Acclaimed Irish novelist who wrote 'The Country Girls'
Edna O'Brien, who has died aged 93, created a sensation with her debut novel, in 1960. Written from self-exile in London and based in part on her own experiences, "The Country Girls" was about two convent girls growing up in rural Ireland and their sexual awakening when they embark on their adult lives in Dublin. In the US and elsewhere, readers found O'Brien's writing "compelling, touching and truthful", said The New York Times. Young women's passions, and the intensity of their lives, had never been described with such honesty. But in Ireland the book caused an uproar. Denounced as a "smear on Irish womanhood", it was banned, and so were its two follow-up novels. Even O'Brien's family were appalled: she recalled that her mother, who adored her, "was too ashamed to be proud", and hid her copy of the book away.
A strikingly elegant woman, with auburn hair and green eyes, O'Brien came to be seen as a "glamorous" international literary star with a faint hint of scandal about her, said The Telegraph."Her views on sex were much quoted." But in her books, which became increasingly experimental, she explored, fearlessly, the full spectrum of female experience – "joy and sorrow, love, crossed love and unrequited love, success and failure, fame and slaughter". Having been criticised in Ireland for focusing on the Ireland of her youth, from the 1990s she set about examining the social and political changes sweeping her homeland, said The Guardian. "House of Splendid Isolation" dealt with the Troubles; "In the Forest" was based on a notorious triple murder in County Clare; "Down by the River", also based on real events, was about a young victim of rape-incest seeking an abortion. "I am seen as a genteel, romantic writer," she said. "But the reality of what I'm doing is this: I am a savage writer with a savage eye. I write about the things we are not supposed to speak about."
Josephine Edna O'Brien was born in County Clare in 1930. Her mother was deeply pious. Her father was an alcoholic, prone to violent rages. To escape these, she'd wander into the fields to write stories. At home the only books were bloodstock reports and prayer books, said The Times, but in that small community, she was aware, she said, of "everyone's little history, the stuff from which stories and novels are made". Then, while training to become a pharmacist in Dublin, she acquired a copy of T.S. Eliot's introduction to the work of James Joyce. She became a committed Joycean, and later wrote a biography of the writer.
It was also in Dublin that she met her future husband, Ernest Gébler, a writer some 15 years her senior. He was married and their affair caused such a furore that, in 1959, they fled to London. She never lived permanently in Ireland again, but remained Irish, she said. "It is a state of mind as well as an actual country." In exile, she felt liberated to write, but Gébler became jealous of her talent – and controlling; she left him in 1964.
Fiercely dedicated to her work, she wrote books, plays and screenplays for films including "X, Y and Zee" (1972). She mixed in starry circles. Paul McCartney came to a party at her house and tucked her sons into bed. She had an affair with Robert Mitchum; visited the White House; and went on an acid trip with R.D. Laing. Philip Roth described her as the best living female writer in English. She was still writing in her late 80s: her final book, 2019's "Girl", was about the abduction of schoolgirls in Nigeria. By then, she had finally been accepted in Ireland, too. Her many garlands included the Irish Pen Lifetime Achievement Award. Her mother, however, had died unreconciled to her career and still fretting about her soul, said The Times. In a story based on their relationship, O'Brien wrote of wishing for a chance "to begin our journey all over again, to live our lives as they should have been lived, happy, trusting, and free of shame".