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 recognisable genres and narrative forms.
When O’Brien’s first novel, The Country Girls, was published in 1960, all that changed. As her friend and peer Philip Roth remarked: “While Joyce, in Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist, was the first Irish Catholic to make his experience and surroundings recognisable, ‘the world of Nora Barnacle’ had to wait for the fiction of Edna O’Brien.”
Written in exile in London, The Country Girls brought O’Brien, who has died aged 93, to international attention.
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 banned, as were several subsequent books. The notoriety established an enduring public persona – the glamorous and worldly, convent-educated libertine – which sometimes worked to the detriment of O’Brien’s reputation as a serious and committed writer. For decades, her name operated as a byword for transgression and subversion, particularly for women.
In addition to more than two dozen novels and short story collections, O’Brien produced numerous plays, a couple of memoirs, children’s books and a collection of poems. The largely first person, linear narratives of her early novels evolved into a consciously experimental style in the 1970s and 80s. A Pagan Place (1970) is written in the second person singular: Night (1972) is a single sustained monologue.
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, among other things, give voice to female subjectivity. But her themes were entirely her own.
In 1983, the writer and journalist Nuala O’Faolain wrote: “Edna O’Brien is not a writer within a conscious literature. She owes nothing to any predecessor or to any tradition. She is a writer with one theme, women who love and suffer.”
From the 90s onwards, O’Brien consciously expanded her range in a quartet of books that dealt with the massive social, political and economic changes that were sweeping through Ireland, themes largely ignored by other Irish writers.
The first of these, House of Splendid Isolation (1994), dealt with the Troubles via the relationship between a fugitive Republican, McGreevy (based on the Republican paramilitary Dominic McGlinchey, whom she interviewed at Portlaoise prison), and an elderly woman, Josie, whom he takes hostage. In the same year, she interviewed Gerry Adams for the New York Times and in 1995 published an open letter in the Independent calling on the then leader of the Labour party, Tony Blair, to open up a dialogue with Republicans.
In Ireland and England, O’Brien’s involvement in political activity and her perceived sympathy for the Republican movement led to widespread criticism – in the Guardian she was described by Edward Pearce as “the Barbara Cartland of long-distance republicanism”. By insisting that dialogue is the necessary first step of any conflict resolution, O’Brien did no more than anticipate the zeitgeist.
In subsequent books, O’Brien fictionalised divisive events that an increasingly prosperous Ireland would sooner have ignored. The real story of a 14-year-old rape victim who had been stopped, by law, from leaving Ireland for an abortion became Down By the River (1996). Generally speaking, these books were poorly reviewed in the UK and Ireland. Many of O’Brien’s severest critics were the same people who found her intervention in politics offensive and she was routinely accused of being out of touch with modern Ireland.
Her 2002 book, In the Forest, was based on a notorious triple murder in County Clare. O’Brien’s fictional killer, O’Kane, descends into madness and violence via a life of exclusion and abuse. Writing about the novel in the Irish Times, Fintan O’Toole painted the actual events as beyond human comprehension while at the same time excoriating O’Brien: “...(the events) did not and do not have a public meaning ... there is simply no artistic need for so close an intrusion into other people’s grief.”
There is an irony here: the Ireland that had been scandalised by the antics of 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.
There is an urgent, heightened quality to these books – their narratives strain as they shuttle back and forth across space and time. Chapters are routinely no more than two pages long, staccato dialogue sits cheek by jowl with descriptive passages of extraordinary vividness and terseness. Reviewing O’Brien’s The Little Red Chairs (2016) in the New Yorker, James Wood described her late style as one that “mixes and reinvents inherited forms, blithely shifts from third-person to first-person narration, reproduces dreams and dramatic monologues”.
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.
The daughter of Lena (nee Cleary) and Michael O’Brien, Edna was born in the village of Tuamgraney, County Clare, into a newly independent Ireland where church and state conspired to control all aspects of women’s lives and bodies. Her family had the trappings of wealth – they lived in a large house with a gate lodge, kept horses and employed farm workers – but money was scarce.
Her father’s unsuccessful horse breeding, gambling and alcoholism maintained a constant level of tension in the house, which often erupted into violence. Her mother’s love for her bordered on the obsessional – Edna was the youngest by five years of four children. Decades later, Lena’s frequent letters to her exiled daughter in London, many of which admonished Edna for her writing and lifestyle, ended with the hope that they would be buried together.
O’Brien claimed that the only books in her childhood home were bloodstock manuals and the Bible, and she often made reference to her mother’s visceral fear of writing. Her turbulent childhood remained a constant touchstone in her fiction, as did the landscape of County Clare. She was educated at the Convent of Mercy in Loughrea, where she excelled at the sciences – her English teacher found her assignments “too exuberant” – and she enrolled in a pharmaceutical college in Dublin, working part-time in a chemist shop.
She met the Irish-Czech writer Ernest Gébler, eloped with him and subsequently married him, against her parents’ wishes, in the summer of 1954. In 1960, the couple and their two sons, Carlo and Sasha, moved to London, where O’Brien was engaged by the publishers Hutchinson to undertake manuscript reports. Iain Hamilton, who ran Hutchinson, was sufficiently impressed with her efforts that he and Blanche Knopf advanced £25 each to get her to write a novel. The Country Girls was written in three weeks.
O’Brien’s success led to strain on her marriage with Gébler and it broke down in 1966. As with her childhood, it provided a rich seam for her writing. She engaged in a successful three-year custody battle for her sons – she had walked out in the middle of cooking dinner one evening – and this included making an undertaking before a court that she would never let her sons see her 1965 novel, August Is a Wicked Month. The acrimony with Gébler continued – he claimed that he had largely written her early books.
Not since Oscar Wilde had an Irish émigré in London lived such a flamboyant life. O’Brien moved in an international celebrity set and spent extended periods in the US, where she enjoyed a large following. Her friends included Jane Fonda, Jackie Kennedy, Samuel Beckett, Mick Jagger, Francis Bacon, Ted Hughes, Princess Margaret, Ian McKellen and Harold Pinter. In 1972, she was described in the Longford report on pornography as a “purveyor of insidiously pornographic and perverted views on sex”. She took LSD with RD Laing, a disastrous experiment that unhinged her mind for a year. She was a regular at the White House St Patrick’s Day party, and posed for Bill Brandt and David Hockney.
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 characterised as victims.
O’Brien was routinely referred to as “the Irish Colette”. It was difficult to square a statement such as “I am obsessed by love, by the need of it and the near impossibility of it …” with the impulse in early feminism for independence and activism. But, while O’Brien’s female protagonists might not provide ready standard-bearers, that was never really her project.
The fine short story The Love Object (1968) perhaps offers a deeper insight into her real motivation. An impassioned affair between a television announcer, Martha, and a “famous”, happily married, lawyer ends badly and Martha reaches suicidal depths. As she slowly, gradually recovers from the affair she finds herself falling in love with the memory of the lover more deeply than ever she had been while he was available to her. The story ends with these lines: “I suppose you wonder why I torment myself like this with details of his presence but I need it, I cannot let go of him now, because if I did, all our happiness and my subsequent pain – I cannot vouch for his – will all have been nothing, and nothing is a dreadful thing to hang on to.” More Proust than Colette.
Casual sexism is commonplace in writing about female writers and O’Brien suffered more than most in this regard. Profiles and reviews of her books concentrated on her looks, her poetic manner of speaking, her accent, speculation about lovers, often at the expense of her writing.
It is hard to imagine Seamus Heaney, John Banville or Colm Tóibín being written about in this way. As she wryly commented: “It’s assumed that in order to be a serious writer, you have to look like the back of a bus.” Because she was regarded as a scandalous woman, it was assumed that all of her female characters were thinly disguised autobiography.
This charge simultaneously relegates autobiographical writing to a secondary category and implies that women’s experience is unworthy of “serious” literature. O’Brien is on record as saying: “Whether a novel is autobiographical or not does not matter. What is important is the truth in it and the way that truth is expressed.”
Although the final decade of O’Brien’s life was marred with ill-health, she continued to write. At the same time, the critical response to her work (and appreciation of her career) underwent a significant shift. It is perhaps ironic that the wholly positive reception of writers such as Eimear McBride, Anne Enright and Anna Burns, all of whom owe a significant debt to O’Brien, created an atmosphere in which the older writer could be reassessed. In Ireland, she was given the title Saoi, the highest honour of the Aosdána, in 2015. In 2018 she was made an honorary dame and in 2021 a commander of the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.
Her late novels continued to explore familiar territory – the control of women and their bodies, the treacherous and all pervasive workings of patriarchy, the impossibility of love, the violation of innocence, exile and abandonment – but with a renewed vigour and urgency.
She was drawn to ever more horrific material, and the writing style became sparer and sharper. Reviewing Girl (2019), O’Brien’s reimagining of the 276 schoolgirls kidnapped by Boko Haram jihadists in 2014, in the Guardian, Alex Clark wrote, “There is the blend of economy and lyricism, vignettes tumbling over one another to disorient and energise the reader. There is the intense focus on the emotional lives of women on the sharp end of mental and physical incarceration or constraint, broadening out to sketch in the patriarchal and theocratic structures that hold them there.”
The theme of exile is as old as writing itself. For many Irish writers, it seems to be a prerequisite but for O’Brien it had a particularity that transcended her physical separation from Ireland. From an early age, she perceived her own femininity as a form of exile. She fervently believed that true art could only be produced out of pain, rupture and displacement.
In 1976, in her semi-autobiographical Mother Ireland, she wrote: “I live out of Ireland because something in me warns me that I might stop if I lived there, that I might cease to feel what it has meant to have such a heritage, might grow placid when in fact I want yet again and for indefinable reasons to trace that same route, that trenchant childhood route, in the hope of finding some clue that will, or would, or could, make possible the leap that would restore one to one’s original place and state of consciousness, to the radical innocence of the moment just before birth.”
O’Brien is survived by her sons.
• Josephine Edna O’Brien, writer, born 15 December 1930; died 27 July 2024
