Edna O'Brien

Josephine Edna O'Brien (15 December 1930 – 27 July 2024) was an Irish novelist, memoirist, playwright, poet and short-story writer.

O'Brien's works often revolve around the inner feelings of women and their problems relating to men and society as a whole. Her first novel, The Country Girls (1960), has been credited with breaking silence on sexual matters and social issues during a repressive period in Ireland after the Second World War. The book was banned and denounced from the pulpit. Many of her novels were translated into French. Her memoir, Country Girl, was published in 2012, and her last novel, Girl, was published in 2019. Many of her novels were based in Ireland, especially in County Clare, to farmer Michael O'Brien and Lena Cleary, at Tuamgraney in County Clare, Ireland, a place she would later describe as "fervid" and "enclosed". She had a Roman Catholic upbringing Michael O'Brien, "whose family had seen wealthier times" as landowners, had inherited a "thousand acres or more" and "a fortune from rich uncles", but was a "profligate" hard-drinker who gambled away his inheritance, the land "sold off in bits ... or bartered to pay debts". Her mother, Lena, "came from a poorer background". According to O'Brien, her mother was a strong, controlling woman, who had emigrated temporarily to America and worked for some time as a maid in Brooklyn, New York, for a well-off Irish-American family, before returning to Ireland to raise her family.

From 1941 to 1946, O'Brien was educated at St. Raphael's College, a boarding school run by the Sisters of Mercy a circumstance that contributed to a "suffocating" childhood. She recalled: "I rebelled against the coercive and stifling religion into which I was born and bred. It was very frightening and all-pervasive. I'm glad it has gone." Because she deeply missed her mother, she became fond of a nun and tried to identify the nun with herself.

In 1950, having studied at night at a pharmaceutical college and worked in a Dublin pharmacy during the day, O'Brien was awarded a licence as a pharmacist. It was the first part of a trilogy of novels (later collected as The Country Girls Trilogy), which included The Lonely Girl (1962) and Girls in Their Married Bliss (1964). Shortly after their publication, the books were placed on the censorship index and banned in her native country because of their frank portrayals of the sex lives of their characters. O'Brien herself was accused of "corrupting the minds of young women". She later said, "I felt no fame. I was married. I had young children. All I could hear out of Ireland from my mother and anonymous letters was bile and odium and outrage". The book was also denounced from the pulpit. It had been claimed that copies of The Country Girls were burned when it was published, but according to Mary Kenny, in a letter to The Times in July 2024, an investigation in 2015 found no witnesses or evidence and it was concluded that the story was probably "legend rather than fact".

Many of her novels were not well received in Ireland. Her fourth novel, August Is a Wicked Month (1965), in which an unhappily married woman has a "sensual awakening on the French Riviera", was excoriated in the press and banned in Ireland. In The Forest (2002), a fictional account of a notorious Irish murder, was described by Irish Times critic Fintan O'Toole as "morally criminal".

Alongside Teddy Taylor (Conservative), Michael Foot (Labour) and Derek Worlock (Catholic Archbishop of Liverpool), O'Brien was a panel member for the first edition of the BBC's Question Time in 1979, and was awarded the first answer in the programme's history ("Edna O'Brien, you were born there", referring to Ireland). Taylor's death in 2017 left her the sole surviving member. In 1980, she wrote a play, Virginia, about Virginia Woolf, which was first staged in June 1980 at the Stratford Festival, Ontario, Canada. It was subsequently performed in the West End of London, at the Theatre Royal Haymarket, starring Maggie Smith, and directed by Robin Phillips. The play was staged at The Public Theater in New York in 1985. Also in 1980, O'Brien appeared alongside Patrick McGoohan in the TV movie The Hard Way. She told Marianne Heron, of the Irish Independent, that she had told McGlinchey "that she liked everything about him except what he was [and] he told her that his mother said the same thing".

Down by the River (1996) concerned an underage rape victim who sought an abortion in England, the "Miss X case". In the Forest (2002) dealt with the real-life case of Brendan O'Donnell, who abducted and murdered a woman, her three-year-old son, and a priest, in rural Ireland. Poet Imtiaz Dharker, judge for the 2019 David Cohen Prize, said about Girl: "I thought I had the course of O'Brien's work mapped out before the judging came around, and then, towards the end of the process, another great tome dropped through the letterbox, changing the whole terrain". O'Brien regarded Girl as a continuation of the focus of her career, "to chart and get inside the mind, soul, heart and emotion of girls in some form of restriction, some form of life that isn't easy, but who find a way to literally plough their way through and come out as winners of sort – maybe not getting prizes – but come through their experiences and live to tell the tale. It is a theme I have lived and often cried with". After the publication of Girl in 2019, she featured in a number of French publications, including Télérama, Elle, Le Monde des Livres, and Le Journal du Dimanche. including correspondence, drafts, notes and revisions.

Personal life

In 1954, O'Brien met in Dublin and married, against her parents' wishes, the Irish writer Ernest Gébler who was of Czech origin and 16 years her senior. The couple moved to London in 1959, where, as she later put it, "We lived in SW 20. Sub-urb-ia". an architect who lives in London, and writer Carlo Gébler, but the marriage ended in 1964. Initially believing he deserved credit for helping her become an accomplished writer, Ernest came to believe he was the author of O'Brien's books. In 2009, Carlo revealed that his parents' marriage had been volatile, with bitter rows between his mother and father over her success. Ernest Gébler died in 1998.

O'Brien remained in London until her death, although she often visited Ireland.) The press often portrayed O'Brien as a "party girl", with American magazine Vanity Fair calling her "the playgirl of the western world". She socialised with glamorous men such as Marlon Brando and Robert Mitchum, but said later that she was "doing the cooking" at most of the parties. She is buried on Inis Cealtra (Holy Island), an island in Lough Derg.

According to Scottish novelist Andrew O'Hagan, O'Brien's place in Irish letters is assured: "She changed the nature of Irish fiction; she brought the woman's experience and sex and internal lives of those people on to the page, and she did it with style, and she made those concerns international." Irish novelist Colum McCann avers that O'Brien has been "the advance scout for the Irish imagination" for over fifty years. The documentary is based on her journals (narrated by Jessie Buckley), and includes interviews with O'Brien and others.

Recognition, awards and honours

Philip Roth once described her as "the most gifted woman now writing in English". A former president of Ireland, Mary Robinson, cited her as "one of the great creative writers of her generation". Others who hailed her as one of the greatest writers of her time included John Banville, Michael Ondaatje and Ian McKellen.

O'Brien's awards included the Yorkshire Post Book Award in 1970 (for A Pagan Place) and 'Book of the Year' in 1972;

In 2009, O'Brien was honoured with the Bob Hughes Lifetime Achievement Award during a special ceremony at the year's Irish Book Awards in Dublin. Her collection Saints and Sinners won the 2011 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, In 2017, for her contributions to literature, she was appointed an honorary Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire.

O'Brien was presented with the Torc of the Saoi of Aosdána in 2015 by Irish President Michael D. Higgins. In 2024, Higgins noted that her "election as Saoi, chosen by her fellow artists, was the ultimate expression of the esteem in which her work is held". He presented her with the Presidential Distinguished Service Award in 2018.

In 2019, O'Brien was awarded the David Cohen Prize for Literature at a ceremony in London. The £40,000 prize, awarded every two years in recognition of a living writer's lifetime achievement in literature, has been described as the "UK and Ireland Nobel in literature". Judge David Park said "In winning the David Cohen Prize, Edna O'Brien adds her name to a literary roll call of honour". In March 2021, France announced that it would be naming O'Brien a Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, the country's highest honour for the arts.

1970: The Yorkshire Post Book Award (Book of the Year), for A Pagan Place
2001: Irish PEN Award
2018: PEN/Nabokov Award
2019: Prix Femina spécial, awarded in honour of her whole body of work; the first time a non-French author had won it
2011: "The Country Girls" ()
2014: "Joyce's Women" ()

Screenplays

1971: "Zee & Co." ()

Nonfiction books

1976: Mother Ireland, ()
1977: Arabian Days ()
1979: Some Irish Loving, as editor: anthology ()
1981: James & Nora (); reprinted in 2020
1986: Vanishing Ireland (with photographs by Richard Fitzgerald), ()
1999: James Joyce, biography ()
2009: Byron in Love, biography ()
2012: Country Girl, memoir ()

Children's books

1981: The Dazzle ()
1982: A Christmas Treat ()
1983: The Rescue ()
2017: Tales for the Telling, ()

Poetry collections

1989: On the Bone ()

Short stories

{| class="wikitable"

! Title !! Publication !! Collected in

| "Orphan on the Run" || The Saturday Evening Post (6 August 1955) || -

| "Summer Encounter" || The Saturday Evening Post (21 December 1957) || -

| "Irish Revel" aka "Come Into the Drawing Room, Doris" || The New Yorker (6 October 1962) || The Love Object

| "The Small Town Lovers" aka "The Lovers" || The New Yorker (16 February 1963) || Mrs. Reinhardt

| "The Rug" || The New Yorker (16 March 1963) || The Love Object

| "Sister Imelda" || Winter's Tales 9 (1963) The New Yorker (9 November 1981) || Returning

| "An Outing" aka "Lovely to Look At, Delightful to Hold" || The New Yorker (28 March 1964) || rowspan=2| The Love Object

| "Cords" aka "Which of Those Two Ladies Is He Married To?" || The New Yorker (25 April 1964)

| "My First Love" || Ladies' Home Journal (June 1965) || -

| "How to Grow a Wisteria" aka "Let the Rest of the World Go By" || Ladies' Home Journal (July 1965) || The Love Object

| "A Woman by the Seaside" aka "A Woman at the Seaside" || Nova (August 1965) || Mrs. Reinhardt

| "The Love Object" || The New Yorker (13 May 1967) || rowspan=3| The Love Object

| "The Mouth of the Cave" || rowspan=2| The Love Object (July 1968)

| "Paradise"

| "Brothers and Sisters" || Transatlantic Review 30 (Autumn 1968) || -

| "Ma" || The New Yorker (22 July 1972) || from Night

| "Over" || The New Yorker (2 December 1972) || rowspan=9| A Scandalous Woman

| "The Creature" || The New Yorker (30 July 1973)

| "Love-Child" || The New Yorker (29 October 1973)

| "Honeymoon" || Cosmopolitan (December 1973)

| "A Journey" || The New Yorker (11 February 1974)

| "The Favourite" || The New Yorker (11 March 1974)

| "The House of My Dreams" || The New Yorker (12 August 1974)

| "A Scandalous Woman" || rowspan=2| A Scandalous Woman (1974)

| "Sisters"

| "Forgetting" aka "The Jewel" || Viva (April 1975) || rowspan=2| Mrs. Reinhardt

| "Baby Blue" || The New Yorker (9 June 1975)

| "The Classroom" || The New Yorker (21 July 1975) || -

| "Ways" || The New Yorker (9 February 1976) || rowspan=8| Mrs. Reinhardt

| "Number Ten" || The New Yorker (16 August 1976)

| "In the Hours of Darkness" || The New Yorker (13 September 1976)

| "Christmas Roses" || The Atlantic (December 1977)

| "A Rose in the Heart of New York" aka "A Rose in the Heart" || The New Yorker (1 May 1978)

| "Mary" || Punch (1978)

| "Clara" || rowspan=2| Mrs. Reinhardt (May 1978)

| "Mrs. Reinhardt"

| "Starting" || The New Yorker (4 September 1978) || A Rose in the Heart

| "Green Georgette" || The New Yorker (23 October 1978) || Saints and Sinners

| "My Mother's Mother" aka "Far Away in Australia" aka "Kin" || The New Yorker (25 December 1978) || rowspan=2| Returning

| "Ghosts" || The New Yorker (9 April 1979)

| "Violets" || The New Yorker (5 November 1979) || A Fanatic Heart

| "The Doll" || Redbook (December 1979) || Returning

| "The Call" || The New Yorker (3 December 1979) || rowspan=3| A Fanatic Heart

| "The Plan" || The New Yorker (25 February 1980)

| "The Return" || The New Yorker (2 February 1981)

| "The Connor Girls" aka "The Conner Girls" || The New Yorker (9 March 1981) || rowspan=5| Returning

| "Savages" || The New Yorker (18 January 1982)

| "The Bachelor" || The New Yorker (8 March 1982)

| "Tough Men" || rowspan=2| Returning (1982)

| "Courtship"

| "Storm" aka "A Long Way from Home" || Redbook (May 1985) || rowspan=12| Lantern Slides

| "Epitaph" || The New Yorker (27 April 1987)

| "A Little Holiday" || The New Yorker (27 July 1987)

| "Another Time" || The New Yorker (14 November 1988)

| "The Widow" || The New Yorker (23 January 1989)

| "Dramas" || The Paris Review 110 (Spring 1989)

| "A Demon" aka "A Day Out" || The New Yorker (24 April 1989)

| "What a Sky" || The New Yorker (10 July 1989)

| "Lantern Sldes" || The New Yorker (1 January 1990)

| "Brother" || Antaeus 64/65 (Spring-Autumn 1990)

| "Long Distance" || Harper's (June 1990)

| "Oft in the Stilly Night" || Lantern Slides (1990)

| "No Place" || The New Yorker (17 June 1991) || rowspan=3| from Time and Tide

| "The Cut" || The New Yorker (4 November 1991)

| "Wilderness" || The New Yorker (16 March 1992)

| "A Bed of Roses" || The Spectator (18-25 December 1993) || -

| "Sinners" aka "Sin" || The New Yorker (11 July 1994) || rowspan=3| Saints and Sinners

| "Manhattan Medley" aka "Love's Lesson || Zoetrope: All-Story (Summer 1998)

| "My Two Mothers" aka "Forbidden" || The New Yorker (20 March 2000)

| "A Boy in the Forest" || The New Yorker (4 February 2002) || from In the Forest

| "Send My Roots Rain" || The Times (10 May 2009) || rowspan=7| Saints and Sinners

| "Old Wounds" || The New Yorker (8-15 June 2009)

| "Shovel Kings" || The Atlantic & Kindle (December 2009)

| "Inner Cowboy" || Subtropics 11/12 (Winter-Spring 2011)

| "Black Flower" || The Times (30 January 2011)

| "Madame Cassandra" || rowspan=2| Saints and Sinners (May 2011)

| "Plunder"

References

External links

2015 interview with Philip Dodd on BBC
at WiredForBooks, 22 May 1992
"Lit Chat" at salon.com, 2 December 1995
"You have to be lonely to be a writer" – O'Brien video interview for The Guardian, 7 December 2012
Video recording of O'Brien reads an extract from her autobiography Country Girl
O'Brien papers, circa 1939–2000, at Emory University