Room Lesson Plan

Emma Donoghue was born in Dublin, Ireland in the late 1960s. She is the youngest of eight children, and her father was a literary critic. She has been working and supporting herself as a writer since she was 23 years old and takes pride in never having had a “regular” job. In 1990, she earned a bachelor's degree from the University College Dublin and then earned a PhD in English from Girton College, Cambridge. Her dissertation focused on coed friendships in 18th century literature. She sometimes uses her life experience to inspire her fiction. For instance, she lived in a women's co-op while working on her PhD, and that experience helped her write her short story "The Welcome." She also...