Helen Brophy

Helen Brophy is Connell Waldron’s girlfriend during his university years, and their relationship gives him a sense of emotional openness and everyday belonging that he had not previously known. Yet its limits emerge around Marianne Sheridan: Helen can see the importance of their past, while Connell struggles to describe it plainly and to separate that attachment from his present relationship.

Identity and Background

Helen studies Medicine and was popular at school, as Connell was. She is attentive to the social ties that sustain her life: she keeps in touch with old friends and extended family, remembers birthdays, posts nostalgic photographs, RSVPs to parties, arrives on time, and takes group photographs until everyone is satisfied with one. Connell comes to understand these habits not as superficial polish but as signs of the kind of person she is. Her ordinary friendliness helps him recognize that he likes kindness and wants to become a kind person himself.

She had one serious boyfriend before Connell, Rory, whom she left in her first year of college. Connell has looked Rory up on Facebook and finds him superficially similar to himself in build and complexion, though he judges him uncool. Their teasing about coolness also shows Helen’s ease in challenging Connell’s self-image: she calls him uncool, jokes about his strong Sligo accent, and treats his provincial manner as affectionate rather than disqualifying.

Relationship with Connell

Connell tells Marianne that he has been seeing Helen for about six weeks and that he loves her. For him, the relationship makes emotional expression newly possible. He can type and send an affectionate message, sit down to dinner with Helen’s parents, and accompany her to parties with her friends. The feeling is not simply romantic excitement: Helen’s presence helps him participate in ordinary social situations without experiencing them only as tests he might fail.

Their connection also includes a gentle intimacy built through humour. When Connell admits that he has looked up Rory, Helen asks what he thinks of him; their joking continues in bed, where she calls Connell uncool and teases him about his accent. Connell laughs with her, pleased that he can make her laugh. The ease of these exchanges contrasts with the anxious self-monitoring that marks his encounters with Marianne and the strain he feels in public settings.

Distance does not end the relationship. During a summer trip through European cities with Niall and Elaine, Connell repeatedly seeks out internet cafés to call Helen on Skype, text Lorraine, and email Marianne. Helen is spending the summer on a J1 in Chicago. He enjoys seeing her face and feels happier after their calls, even when the conversations are awkward because her friends are nearby or the café is crowded. He sometimes hurries to end a call, then savours the experience afterward, when he no longer has to manage each expression and response in real time. His affection is genuine, but the contrast between anticipation and conversational pressure reveals how difficult sustained social performance remains for him.

Marianne and the Pressure of the Past

Helen encounters Marianne in February on Dawson Street, when Connell and Helen are walking hand in hand and Marianne emerges from Hodges Figgis wearing a black beret. Connell panics and cannot bring himself to let go of Helen’s hand. The two women nevertheless speak competently and genially while he stands by, overwhelmed by the meeting.

Afterward, Helen asks whether Connell and Marianne were always just friends. He says they were never together as such, then acknowledges that they had slept together, in their final year of school and again for a while the previous year. He describes it as a friends-with-benefits arrangement and insists it was not serious. His repeated qualification that Marianne was not his girlfriend does not make the history disappear: he covers his face while Helen questions him, and he remembers only after Helen has noticed him anxiously raking his lower lip with his teeth.

Helen makes an effort to befriend Marianne, complimenting her hair and clothes when they meet at parties. But Marianne’s sustained interest in political subjects does not always fit the lighter conversation around them. After one long discussion about Israel, Helen tells Connell that she finds Marianne self-absorbed. Connell resists that interpretation: he says Marianne is genuinely interested in these issues, and admits that he is interested too. The disagreement shows that Helen’s unease is not simply a rejection of Marianne’s intelligence; it concerns the place Marianne occupies in Connell’s attention and their shared past.

Breakup and Narrative Significance

After Rob’s funeral, Helen asks Connell why he had not introduced her to more of his friends and says that he seemed especially pleased to see Marianne. Connell is grieving and resents the argument turning back toward Marianne, but he cannot deny that he was glad to see her. Helen says she has been sympathetic about his friend’s death while also insisting that she noticed him looking at another woman in church. Their argument leaves their competing experiences exposed: Connell sees himself as behaving normally with an old friend during a funeral, while Helen sees a closeness that makes her feel excluded from the relationship.

They break up two weeks later. By then Connell is exhausted and miserable, experiencing crying fits and panic attacks while feeling emotionally numb. Helen is not presented as the cause of that distress; rather, their final conflict occurs amid his grief and shows that the relationship, despite its tenderness and the new possibilities it gave him, cannot resolve the significance of Marianne or make Connell feel entirely at ease with himself.

Helen’s importance therefore lies both in what Connell experiences with her and in what their relationship cannot contain. She gives him a practical model of warmth, social attentiveness, and direct affection, while her questions make his history with Marianne harder to dismiss as a closed chapter. The breakup follows not from a simple lack of love, but from the tension between the life Connell can build with Helen and the older attachment that remains emotionally active.