One of the greatest Irish writers of the modern era, Edna O’Brien died on 27 July 2024, at the age of 93. Tributes sprang up around the world and continued to be published and broadcast for months afterwards. The fact that her passing was publicly mourned in her own country, that her life and work were celebrated and honoured in her homeland, marked the triumphal final act of her career, which began with several of her novels being banned by the Irish censors and decades of ad hominen attacks from her native country, where she had often been treated with scorn and a source of national shame. However, from the beginning of her long career, O’Brien’s achievements and talents were recognized elsewhere in the world. The author of eighteen novels, eight short-story collections, three biographies, a volume of poetry, two memoirs, dozens of plays, a series of children’s books, and hundreds of short stories, in addition to teleplays, screenplays, editorials, book reviews, and journalistic pieces for major British publications, O’Brien was awarded prestigious literary prizes internationally over decades, including the PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature (2018), the David Cohen Prize for Literature (2019), being named commander of the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (2021), France’s highest literary honour, and being made an honorary Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire for her contributions to literature (2017). Her work has been translated into at least twenty-five languages. These extraordinary heights of success were reached by a woman of humble, if not obscure, origins.
Josephine Edna O’Brien was born on 15 December 1930 (a date she was sometimes vague about at the height of her fame) to Michael O’Brien and Lena (Helena) O’Brien, née Cleary. She was born in rural County Clare, in Drewsboro, a house outside the town of Tuamgraney, to a once-comfortable family whose fortunes had declined by the time of O’Brien’s birth as a result of her father’s addiction to horses and drink. In a public humiliation, also experienced by her literary idol James Joyce in his childhood, O’Brien’s father appeared as a bankrupt in Stubbs Gazette. The youngest of four children whose closest sibling was significantly older, O’Brien lived most of her time in the family home, as, in effect, an only child. She developed an intensely close and interdependent relationship with her mother, a relationship that provided many of the author’s most enduring, trenchant, and poignant literary themes and images of love and loss.
In her 2012 memoir, Country Girl, O’Brien describes her writing life as largely inspired by a profound connection to the natural world in and around the family farm. A lonely girl, she spent a great deal of her time wandering the fields, communing with trees and birds, living in her imagination. In school, she was a favourite of teachers and was often asked to write other students’ essays for them. Though her own home was without books (other than the General Stud Book), she thrilled to the poems and novels read in her lessons and especially loved the travelling players who performed stirring works of melodrama and horror, including recurring favourites, stage adaptations of East Lynne and Dracula. She had a precocious desire for publication and, if without books, there were always newspapers in the home. She wanted to compete with a local figure who wrote a nature column for a small newspaper, an urge she calls her “daft ambition to be a writer” (O’Brien, 2012, 38), which she pursued by describing the landscape to which she was passionately attached. This early practice in creating lush and detailed descriptions of her immediate environment would become a distinctive feature of her prize-winning prose. Even her detractors have acknowledged her considerable powers of observation and vivid evocation of place.
O’Brien did not succeed in her early, local publishing ambitions, but she did secure a job writing a weekly “women’s interest” column for The Link, CIE’s in-house magazine, (Córas Iompair Éireann, the national transportation service), not long after arriving in Dublin, writing under the name “Sabiola” (O’Brien, 2012, 106). Having finished her secondary education in the Convent of Mercy, in Loughrea, County Galway, O’Brien moved to Dublin to pursue the practical career of pharmacologist, attending classes at night and working in a chemist’s shop during the day. At the same time, she continued to write and occasionally placed pieces in Irish journals, like The Bell, often under the pseudonym “Dina Bryan”. It was at the chemist’s shop that she met her future father-in-law who introduced her to his son, Ernest Gébler. At the time of the meeting, 1952, Gébler was a successful writer, one of whose bestselling novels, The Plymouth Adventure, had recently been made into a major Hollywood film starring Spencer Tracy. He was also a divorced father of a son from whom he was estranged, and, to many Irish people at the time, a “foreigner”, being of Czech-Jewish background (though born in Dublin). Like his father, Gébler was beguiled by O’Brien’s rustic innocence that contrasted charmingly with her aspirational interest in the arts, especially the work of modernist geniuses like T.S. Eliot and James Joyce. When this interest in literature proved to be serious and inspired the publication of O’Brien’s own bestseller, the 1960 novel The Country Girls, an already unhappy marriage became unbearable. Gébler and O’Brien had “eloped” to Wicklow in 1954, a humiliating scandal for O’Brien’s family, relocating to London in 1958, where they raised two sons until separating in 1964, legally divorcing in 1967. O’Brien never remarried.
The Country Girls, which made O’Brien’s lasting fame, was commissioned in 1958 for £50 by Iain Hamilton, O’Brien’s boss at Hutchinson’s publishing, where she worked reading manuscripts. Hamilton was impressed by O’Brien’s reader’s reports and encouraged her to write a novel of her own, which Gébler would spend years claiming as largely his own work. He would later assert that her talent “resided in her knickers”, and claimed to have written her first two books as she slept, rewriting and refining the silly gushing she had produced by day. He continued to insist up to 1988 that he had “held her hand, and taught her the ABC of narrative” (Unsigned, 1988). The Country Girls, written in a few weeks in the fervor typical of first novels, received universally positive notices in the English-speaking world, including in Ireland, but that response began to curdle in O’Brien’s homeland within months of its appearance, once its themes and contents came to the attention of government and church authorities. The book, which represented the reality of the lives of rural women and girls in mid-century Ireland with a bracing honesty that reveals joys as well as deprivations and cruelties, including sexual predation and abuse, was quickly censored by state authorities, as were her next five novels. John Charles McQuaid, Catholic Primate of Ireland and Archbishop of Dublin from 1940 to 1972, led a purity campaign that banned the work of many writers, directing the censors to ban not only work produced in Ireland, but also films and novels coming from abroad that could corrupt the innocence of the unspoiled Irish. He manifested a personal malice towards O’Brien, for example in 1966, referring to the writer, whose career he had tried unsuccessfully to strangle at birth, as “a renegade and a dirty one” (Horgan, 2019, 15).
This sensational novel, which her family in Tuamgraney saw as an act of betrayal, became, with The Lonely Girl (1962; retitled Girl with Green Eyes in 1964), and Girls in Their Married Bliss (1964), the Country Girls Trilogy, to which O’Brien added an Epilogue in 1986 when the three novels were first published as one volume. The trilogy follows the lives of the children of the first novel into disillusioned and unhappy adulthood, so that reviewers lost some enthusiasm for the work, lamenting the lost “freshness”, “energy”, and “zest” they found so captivating in the trilogy’s first installment. Nevertheless, O’Brien had already broken important ground in the depiction of the lives of rural, Roman Catholic, working-class girls and women who had not previously featured significantly in Irish literature. Many contemporary Irish novelists, men and women, including Anne Enright, Claire Keegan, Frank McGuinness, Eimear McBride, Colm McCann, Sean O’Reilly, and Louise Nealon, to name just a few, have credited O’Brien’s work with opening up new possibilities for capturing neglected Irish lives, giving voice to the long silenced.
O’Brien’s’ next novel, Casualties of Peace (1966), set in London, again featured a strong central female friendship and women’s lives violently blighted by controlling men. The novels that followed, A Pagan Place (1970) and Night(1972), returned to Ireland and continued to explore themes that dominated her fiction, the control of women by both individual men—usually fathers, lovers, or husbands—and the larger patriarchal forces of society, not just the usual villains of church and state, but also the less obviously oppressive regimes of sexual liberation and self-actualization taking hold in the 1960s and ’70s, which offered more sophisticated modes of repression and exploitation for women. A Pagan Place and Night were both experimental in style—one entirely in second person and one a Nora-Barnacle-style monologue delivered by a woman in her bed—but O’Brien’s faithful body of readers never abandoned her, whatever stylistic or thematic risks she took. O’Brien’s novels tackle issues of same-sex attraction, adultery, domestic violence, suicide and self-harm, abortion, rape, incest, murder, child abuse, and other controversial topics without apology. Though her fiction came to be most frequently set in England, her protagonists were always Irish women, up until her last novel, Girl (2019), which focuses on the experiences of a young Nigerian girl, Maryam.
Over the course of the 1970s, O’Brien’s prolific output and glamorous personal style made her a media celebrity, something she consciously cultivated in order to support herself and her young sons, who needed to be educated, but which contributed to her growing reputation as a writer of frothy, “racy”, romance novels, of no serious literary significance, focusing entirely on women’s irrelevant emotional lives. This focus on women’s most intimate relationships—not only romantic, but also often between mother and daughter, especially in some of the most memorable short stories, like “A Rose in the Heart”, “The Rug”, “Come Into the Drawing Room, Doris”, “A Scandalous Woman”— ensured her popular success, especially with women readers, further evidence of a lack of literary integrity in the eyes of self-important critics.
In the first decades of her fame, literary opinion was divided regarding this rising international figure. Benedict Kiely defended the “convent girl with her temper riz” against the censors and predicted great things for her (Kiely, 1969, 158), while Bernard Bergonzi bemoaned her “feminine-primitivist rejection of intelligence” (Bergonzi, 1967, 37). John Mellors used the contemporary language of feminism against her, when he asserted that “out of sourness and sentimentality comes female chauvinist terrorism” (Mellors, 1977, 158). Sean McMahon deplored her “retardation” and her “neo-feminist propaganda” (McMahon, 1967, 79), a painful irony at a time when feminists were largely denouncing her work, despite Anatole Broyard’s opinion that the Country Girls Trilogy is a “powerful argument for feminism” (Broyard, 1986, 12), and Julia O’Faolain’s belief, stated in in 1974, that feminists “should be grateful to her … Her stories are bulletins from a front on which they will not care to engage, field reports on the feminine condition at its most acute” (O’Faolain, 1974, 3-4).
Once O’Brien’s novels were no longer censored, and as the fiction was less frequently ostensibly “Irish”, she received little critical or popular attention in Ireland. She was seen as an embarrassment, an exaggerated stereotype of an Irish colleen performing for her UK audience, though O’Brien herself rejected this type of what she called “codology”. Her literary standing declined in the UK in this period as well, whether from anti-Irish sentiment, which was gaining strength as the Northern Irish “Troubles” continued, or the misogyny of the publishing world that undervalued women authors’ work and denigrated their success as indicating a lack of seriousness. One of O’Brien’s most vehement critics, Nick Hornby, in a review of O’Brien’s short-story collection, Lantern Slides, laments her “ploughing the same emotional furrow” in her “airless joyless tales” which feature “little discernible modulation or progression” and stop “just short of evoking leprechauns” (Hornby, 1990, 39). This conflation of cheap Irish stereotypes with tedious repetition appeared as recently as a 2006 review of The Light of Evening in the Observer, which complained, “like the fiddlers who clog up Dublin’s cheesier theme pubs you can’t help but wish that occasionally O’Brien would change her tune” (Hughes, 2006).
Eminent writers in North America, however, were O’Brien’s friends and champions for decades, and despite official censure, her loyal readers remained faithful through the controversies and periodic condemnations, which dogged her career up until the 2002 novel, In the Forest, seen as scandalously exploiting the tragedy of the real-life murders on which the narrative was based, a criticism some scholars have insightfully characterized as gendered. In the Forest was the last of four state-of-the-nation novels – House of Splendid Isolation (1994), Down by the River (1996), Wild Decembers (1999) – all of which featured some element many in the Irish media took exception to, claiming the writer to be out of touch with modern Ireland. It has since been widely accepted that throughout her career O’Brien was bravely addressing some of the most shameful facets of post-Independence Irish culture, such as clerical child sex abuse and the incarceration of women in Magdalene laundries and “mother and baby” homes, before state authorities began to engage with this history in any meaningful way. As deeply unhappy as such treatment by Irish critics made her, she was never discouraged and never stopped writing until the last year of her life, when she was working on a biography of T. S. Eliot, having been invited to deliver the annual T. S. Eliot lecture in 2020 on her 90th birthday while suffering from the cancer that would eventually end her life.
Recognition of the true scholarly, historical, and cultural value of O’Brien’s body of work began in the mid 1990s, with the appearance of novels returning to Ireland focusing on contemporary social problems and the publication in 1996 of a special issue dedicated to O’Brien’s fiction of The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies. This landmark publication was followed by articles in prominent academic journals, two collections of essays, and two monographs on the author’s life and work. This is also when O’Brien’s reputation in Ireland began to undergo a change. Her many and regularly awarded literary prizes began to include Irish acknowledgments at the turn of the twenty-first century. This profound shift in official Ireland’s relationship with O’Brien was heralded perhaps most publicly by a review of her memoir, Country Girl, for the Irish Times, by the former President of Ireland, Mary Robinson, which concludes, “Perhaps now, on its publication, is the time for a proper reassessment of Edna O’Brien as one of the great creative writers of her generation” (Robinson, 2012).
O’Brien’s death was reported as major news around the world, and her carefully curated funeral, which she planned for many years, was covered by all Irish media. It was carried live online by RTÉ television and featured an exceptional eulogy by her long-time friend, Scottish novelist Andrew O’Hagan, delivered to an overflow crowd in Tuamgraney Church. In addition to family, luminaries from the world of politics and entertainment who numbered amongst her many friends, such as Irish President Michael D. Higgins and actor Stephen Rea, were in attendance. She arranged to be buried with her mother’s family on Holy Island (Inis Cealtra) in Lough Derg.
That O’Brien lived to see the remarkable change in Irish attitudes towards her and her writing is to be celebrated, but, as revealed in a recent documentary on the writer’s work and life, Blue Road: The Edna O’Brien Story, directed by Sinéad O’Shea, the wound of that initial mistreatment never fully healed. That such pain persisted to her last days offers further testimony of the remarkable resilience of an unrelenting voice that has been dedicated to witnessing and reporting the joys and sorrows of the voiceless, whether that is young, naïve girls in rural Ireland, neglected, lonely housewives in the suburbs of London, incarcerated young men, Serbian victims of torture, or Nigerian women and girls kidnapped by Boko Haram in Nigeria.
Works Cited
Broyard, Anatole. Review of Country Girls Trilogy, “The
Rotten Luck of Kate and Baba”, The New York Times Review of
Books (11 May 1986), p. 12.
Bergonzi Bernard. Review of Casualties of Peace, “Total
Recall”, New York Review of Books (24 August 1967), p.
37.
Gébler, Carlo [Unsigned]. “Ernest and Edna, living in different
pasts”, Londoner’s Diary, The Standard (22 April
1988).
Horgan, John. “An Irishman’s Diary”, The Irish Times (1
October 2019), p. 15
Hornby, Nick. Review of Lantern Slides, “Yearning and
Canoodling”, The Sunday Correspondent (3 June 1990), p.
39.
Hughes, Sarah. “Déjà vu in Dublin and New York”, The
Observer (15 October 2006).
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2006/oct/15/fiction.features
Kiely, Benedict. “The Whores on the Half-Doors”, Conor Cruise
O’Brien Introduces Ireland, ed. by Owen Dudley Edwards. New
York: McGraw Hill, 1969, pp. 463-69.
McMahon, Sean. “A Sex by Themselves: An Interim Report on the
Novels of Edna O’Brien”, Éire-Ireland 2, no. 1 (1967):
789-87.
Mellors, John. Review of Johnny, I Hardly Knew You,
Listener, Vol. 98 (4 August 1977), p. 158.
O’Brien, Edna. Country Girl: A Memoir. London: Faber and
Faber, 2012.
O’Faolain, Julia. Review of A Scandalous Woman, New York Times
Book Review (22 February 1974), pp. 3-4.
Robinson, Mary. Review of Country Girl”, A life well
lived, well told”, The Irish Times (29 September 2012).
https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/a-life-well-lived-well-told-1.541231
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Citation: McWilliams, Ellen, Maureen O'Connor. "Edna O'Brien". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 30 August 2007; last revised 19 March 2025. [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=3367, accessed 02 May 2025.]
