Edna O’Brien: A writer revered and reviled in Ireland

Edna O’Brien, banned Irish writer and biographer of James Joyce, dead at 93

Edna O’Brien, the prolific Irish author whose evocative and explicit stories of loves lost earned her a literary reputation that matched the darkly complex lives of her tragic heroines, died on July 27 In London. She was 93.

O’Brien wrote dozens of novels and short-story collections over almost 60 years, starting in 1960 with “The Country Girls,” a book that dealt with the emotional conflicts of two Irish girls who rebel against their Roman Catholic upbringing.

When first published, she was considered a literary pioneer whose distinctive style gave voice to women whose passions had never been portrayed with such honesty.

But early criticism left lasting marks. “The Country Girls” had shamed her conservative Roman Catholic parents in rural western Ireland. The book’s honest descriptions of the girls’ sexual escapades appalled many, and with the approval of the Catholic Church hierarchy the book was banned in Ireland, as were several subsequent ones.

Books by O’Brien, who was born in Tuamgraney, Co. Clare, in 1930, often depicted willful but insecure women who loved men who were crass, unfaithful, or already married. The books explore the relationship between the sexes, often from the point of view of women who lose themselves in love, and later must struggle to regain their sovereignty.

Much of her early work carried aspects of autobiography, which stirred whisperings about her morals and led to personal attacks against her back home in Ireland.

Before Edna O’Brien, Irish female writers tended to come from the preserve of the “big house” or enjoyed the kind of privilege that made a life of writing possible. And by and large, their books dealt with genteel themes and conformed to recognizable genres and narrative forms.

When The Country Girls was published in 1960, all that changed.

“While Joyce, in Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist, was the first Irish Catholic to make his experience and surroundings recognizable, ‘the world of Nora Barnacle’ – James Joyce’s muse and wife -- had to wait for the fiction of Edna O’Brien,” her friend and peer Philip Roth once remarked.

The reception in Ireland was largely hostile due to the book’s frank portrayal of female sexuality and desire. It was denounced as a “slur on Irish womanhood,” and the notoriety established an enduring public persona – the glamorous and worldly, convent-educated libertine.

The Ireland that had been scandalized by the antics of the main characters, Baba and Kate, in The Country Girls was still unable to confront the ugly underbelly of a society in which poverty, the degradation of women, violence and routine abuse had been endemic for decades.

“I learned from her,” the American Irish-Catholic novelist Mary Gordon once said, “particularly her way of writing about the intensity and danger of childhood. She has described a kind of girl’s life that hadn’t been talked about before.” 

Although O’Brien’s professional career coincided with feminism, she had an awkward relationship with the movement. Her independence provided an early example for those seeking greater equality with men, but many were uncomfortable with the concentration on love in her early books and the fact that many of her female characters could be characterized as victims.

The boldness of her writing never endeared her to the women’s rights advocates, who disliked her evocation of hard luck singles and desperate mistresses. O’Brien took the rejection in stride.

“I don’t feel strongly about the things they feel strongly about,” she once said, referring to critics in the women’s rights movement. “I feel strongly about childhood, truth or lies, and the real expression of feeling.” 

The debt to Joyce, whom O’Brien revered and was able to quote at length from memory, was obvious. Like Joyce, she understood how the cadences, rhythms and syntax of English as it is spoken in Ireland could be used to liberate narrative from its empirical impulse and give voice to female subjectivity. Her themes were entirely her own.

 O’Brien put this style to great use in her biography of James Joyce (1999). It is still by far the best short introduction to the writer, his works and life. Such was O’Brien’s ability to weave her own words in and around those of Joyce that when the manuscript was submitted to the prickly Joyce estate for approval no changes or deletions were requested.

Compiled by

The Guardian:  https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/jul/29/edna-obrien-obituary

The New York Times:  https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/28/obituaries/edna-o-brien-dead.html

The Paris Review:  https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2978/the-art-of-fiction-no-82-edna-obrien