In a 2011 review for America of Edna O’Brien’s In The Forest, Tom Deignan remembered something the renowned novelist had told him during an interview several years before. O’Brien, he wrote, “told me a story about an appearance of hers in the 1960s on an Irish television program, during which the host said to the studio audience: ‘Hands up, all of you who think Edna O’Brien has shamed her country.’ Most hands, of course, were raised.”
“It was very hurtful, because I thought and still maintain that The Country Girls (and The Lonely Girl and Girls in Their Married Bliss, which followed) were all love songs to Ireland,” O’Brien told Deignan.
And indeed, O’Brien, who died on July 27, seemed to be in many ways the quintessential Irish writer in terms of theme and tone over a 60-year literary career that produced more than 20 novels and short story collections as well as plays, children’s books, biographies, memoirs and a poetry collection. Nevertheless, she spent most of her life outside her native land, and her career began with a highly acclaimed novel that was widely condemned on the Emerald Isle.
Even the story of the writing of The Country Girls is legendary: O’Brien later claimed she composed it in less than three weeks. The book received positive reviews in most of the English-speaking world but was banned in Ireland. The archbishop of Dublin at the time, Archbishop John McQuaid, denounced it as a “smear on Irish womanhood.” And, the legend goes, an offended priest (you know he hadn’t read it) burned the book in public.
What was the beef? The coming-of-age tale of two young Irish women in 1950s rural Ireland, The Country Girls and its two sequels would probably strike most readers today as tame, but their depiction of the interior lives of protagonists Cait Brady and Baba Brennan—and of their romantic entanglements—was criticized as “sexually explicit” at the time in Ireland. Even her own husband and parents quarreled with O’Brien about her writing, as did other Irish literary lights like Frank O’Connor.
It was all just a bit too much for the Ireland of 1960: The writer Anne Enright would say of O’Brien in 2012 that she was “the first Irish woman ever to have sex. For some decades, indeed, she was the only Irish woman to have had sex—the rest just had children.”
O’Brien herself had already left Ireland for London by the time The Country Girls came out. London would be her home for most of her life (“Not since Oscar Wilde had an Irish émigré in London lived such a flamboyant life,” wrote Luke Dodd in an obituary for The Guardian), but she would be associated with the land of her birth throughout a life that took her all over the globe.
She was born in 1930 in Tuamgraney, a small village in County Clare, Ireland (a stone’s throw from where my own grandfather was born). She spent five years in a boarding school in Loughrea, County Galway, run by nuns, an experience she recounted in both her fiction and memoirs. Moving as a teenager to Dublin, O’Brien worked in a drugstore and became a licensed pharmacist.
In 1954, O’Brien married the novelist Ernest Gébler, with whom she had two children. The two eventually settled in London, where O’Brien got a job reading manuscripts for the British publishing company Hutchinson & Co (now Hutchinson Heinemann). O’Brien’s reports caught the eye of two editors who advanced her the equivalent of $75 to write a novel, which became 1960’s The Country Girls.
America didn’t review The Country Girls, though O’Brien’s second novel in the trilogy, The Lonely Girl, received a mostly positive review in 1962. Mostly, because reviewer P. F. Gavaghan couldn’t help himself from a little snark at O’Brien’s bleak portrayal of the auld sod: “Ireland must be a grim place to so many of its sensitive sons and daughters, particularly those who restoke their memories in foreign places and barter their bitterness for literary sale.”
O’Brien followed up her trilogy with August Is a Wicked Month in 1965 (it, too, was banned in Ireland), by which time her long-troubled marriage to Ernest Gébler had ended. A score of novels and other literary works followed over the next 45 years, mostly set in Ireland or featuring Irish women as protagonists; an exception was a 2019 novel based on the Boko Haram kidnapping of over 200 schoolgirls in Nigeria in 2014 (Girl). In 2012, she published a memoir, Country Girl. (She also wrote a somewhat strange poem after Barack Obama’s first inauguration, “Watching Obama,” in which she called the new president “Prince Hamlet himself in Illinois.”)
O’Brien enjoyed a wide circle of friends, including many famous politicians and authors, and was once called “the Playgirl of the Western World” in Vanity Fair for her social calendar and rumored romantic partners.
Critics often praised O’Brien’s novels for depicting the interior lives of her female characters with verve and honesty not often seen, with one noting that “she has the soul of Molly Bloom and the skills of Virginia Woolf.” In a 1995 review of House of Splendid Isolation, the author Ron Hansen noted that the book (about an I.R.A. sniper) was a departure from “her signature themes,” including “female loss and loneliness and the afflictions of the heart.” And in a 2014 review of Country Girl, Claire Schaeffer-Duffy wrote that while O’Brien had been “criticized by her friend Norman Mailer for producing prose that is ‘too interior,’ O’Brien remains committed to the interior view, giving us the heart of a scene in exquisite detail.”
Writers like O’Brien, Deignan wrote, “remind us that even in the 21st century, ancient questions of good and evil, redemption and damnation remain vital, perplexing and ultimately unresolved in many corners of this planet.”
O’Brien remained a Catholic her entire life; one obituary wryly noted her habit of only going to confession in places where the priest didn’t speak English well and so might not understand what he was absolving her of. At her death, she was praised by two past presidents of Ireland and a host of prominent authors. But a comment from the Irish novelist Colum McCann from all the way back in 2011 might have been the one that Edna O’Brien treasured most: He called her “the advance scout for the Irish imagination.”
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Our poetry selection for this week is by the Irish theologian and poet Pádraig Ó Tuama, “Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!” Readers can view all of America’s published poems here.
Members of the Catholic Book Club: We are taking a hiatus this summer while we retool the Catholic Book Club and pick a new selection.
In this space every week, America features reviews of and literary commentary on one particular writer or group of writers (both new and old; our archives span more than a century), as well as poetry and other offerings from America Media. We hope this will give us a chance to provide you with more in-depth coverage of our literary offerings. It also allows us to alert digital subscribers to some of our online content that doesn’t make it into our newsletters.
Other Catholic Book Club columns:
The spiritual depths of Toni Morrison
What’s all the fuss about Teilhard de Chardin?
Moira Walsh and the art of a brutal movie review
Father Hootie McCown: Flannery O’Connor’s Jesuit bestie and spiritual advisor
Who’s in hell? Hans Urs von Balthasar had thoughts.
Happy reading!
James T. Keane
