Edna O’Brien, who has died aged 93, described her native Ireland as “a state of mind as well as an actual country”. Over her 17 novels, scores of short stories, plays, memoirs and essays, she diagnosed the state of that mind — and helped it to change. Michael D Higgins, president of Ireland, paid tribute to her on Sunday as “a fearless teller of truths, a superb writer possessed of the moral courage to confront Irish society with realities long ignored and suppressed”.
A literary career launched in scandal and outrage continued, into her 10th decade, to track a revolution in feeling and belief that liberated lives — especially those of women — in Ireland and beyond. O’Brien both observed that revolution, and pushed it along. At the height of her Swinging Sixties celebrity, Paul McCartney once serenaded her children with an improvised song: “O, Edna O’Brien/ She ain’t lying/ You gotta listen/ To what she gotta say.” For more than 60 years, countless readers did.
Yet the charismatic change-maker remained a serious artist. She kept one eye on the illustrious Irish forebears who had lured her to the rewards, and burdens, of the writer’s calling. The anthology Introducing James Joyce, edited by TS Eliot, first made the teenage student pharmacist realise that “I wanted literature for the rest of my life”. That was in boozy, priest-ridden, late-1940s Dublin, after O’Brien — born in 1930 — had left home in the wake of a “fervid, enclosed and catastrophic” childhood.
Her early years never ceased to nourish and trouble her alike. At Drewsboro, the family house in County Clare, her hard-drinking father mourned the break-up of the estate while her mother — strict, devoted, demanding — set the pattern for all the beloved, resented maternal figures who brood over her work. (Inevitably, in 1976 O’Brien entitled her first autobiographical essay collection Mother Ireland.)
Lush, damp Drewsboro was “the loveliest, leafiest place in the whole world”, but “the wounds of history” — national and domestic — felt “raw and vivid”. Writing (from the age of eight) promised a way to break the deadlocks of home in a newly independent country still in thrall to Catholic dogma and “stooped by a variety of fears”. Rebellion at her convent school presaged her flight to Dublin and training as a pharmacist. Her swift immersion in the city’s literary scene led to marriage, in defiance of her family, to the writer Ernest Gébler: Irish-born, but with Czech-German roots.
The couple escaped Ireland to settle in the drab suburbia of south-west London. They had two sons: Carlo, later an author, and Sasha, an architect. But, as O’Brien found her literary voice, Gébler’s anger and frustration deepened. “You can write and I will never forgive you,” he told her. Her 1960 debut The Country Girls, with its pair of heroines in search of sexual and spiritual freedom, confirmed that gift: lyrical, sensual, but shrewdly satirical too. It branded her in pious Irish eyes as a shameless peddler of sauce and smut. Curses from pulpits and papers descended. That notoriety made her name but also (for a while) cramped her style.
Further novels of awakening and disenchantment followed (Girl with Green Eyes; Girls in Their Married Bliss; August Is a Wicked Month), as O’Brien’s marriage foundered. Meanwhile her fiction, with its insurgent wit and frankness, caught the tide of the times. Bestseller status and film deals added prosperity to renown. Her house in Chelsea became a citadel of 1960s style as celebrities — from Lord Snowdon to Jane Fonda — flowed though the door. Her charmed life then can sound like parody: once, a timely visit from Sean Connery rescued her from a bad acid trip administered by RD Laing. During an illness in Paris, the first three anxious friends to climb her stairs were Marguerite Duras, Peter Brook and Samuel Beckett.
This epoch-defining icon of beauty and charm knew that stardust soon scatters: “I was never carried away.” Lovers came and went but, even when transported by “the vertigo of the affair”, she stayed true to writing and its hard labour of love. She never remarried. After 1977, however, she fell silent as a novelist for a decade. Once, feeling near-suicidal in Singapore, she felt that her work was pigeonholed as a “narrow and obsessional” string of doomed love stories from her emotionally stunted homeland.
Family (a message from Sasha) saved her from that crisis. Then, from the late 1980s, a spate of renewed creative fervour propelled her into an extraordinary second act. She published a series of novels that broadened her literary canvas, while keeping at their heart the lives of women convulsed by change in themselves, and in their societies. The country girl’s province spanned the wide world.
Ireland now honoured her. Still, as the nation modernised, she probed its unhealed injuries in novels such as House of Splendid Isolation (1994), based on IRA killer Dominic McGlinchey. Her drive to understand the violence of the Troubles from within led one critical wag to dub her “the Barbara Cartland of long-distance Republicanism”.
Though feted as an Irish literary elder (and a recipient of the highest honour from the nation’s academy of artists, the Aosdána), O’Brien looked further afield for new inspiration. In the 2010s, now past 80, she researched the psychology of genocide for her Bosnia-inspired novel The Little Red Chairs. An investigative trip to Nigeria resulted in Girl (2019), about the schoolgirls abducted by the Boko Haram sect. Women’s repression and resistance against stifling faith still drove her prose — just as it had in The Country Girls. In 2022, aged 91, she staged her play Joyce’s Women in Dublin: a theme, and setting, close to her heartland.
Younger writers befriended and supported her as she grew frail. Plaudits at home and abroad replaced the gossip and backbiting that had dogged her early steps: in 2019, she won the David Cohen Prize, the career-achievement “Nobel” for British and Irish authors. The rebel hoyden had become a grande dame of sorts. But her sense of unbridled liberty endured. Country Girl, her luminous 2012 memoir, recalls the stabled horses of her childhood, “their pent-up energy so wild, so great . . . as if they would break the doors down”. For generations of readers, in and out of Ireland, O’Brien broke down doors to show what the landscape of freedom might look, and feel, like.
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