The sentence gives us her insight – she recognises that she has not wanted to think about returning to America – but also her evasiveness. But now, back in her home town, where no one knows about Tony, gentle, intense Jim Farrell, is courting her. It is the 1950s, and a woman's choice of a husband is supposed to be irreversible.
She is, we might say, prevaricating about her return to Brooklyn, where Tony, whom she has hurriedly married before embarking, awaits her. His protagonist, Eilis, has come back from New York to her home in Ireland for what was intended as a brief visit.
"S he knew as she sat on the edge of the bed and took her shoes off and then lay with her arms behind her head that she had spent every day putting off all thought of her departure and what she would meet on her arrival." This sentence from Colm Tóibín's Brooklyn is characteristically plain and yet complex.
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