The Irish writer Edna O’Brien, who explored the complications and contradictions of women’s lives in a literary career lasting more than half a century, has died aged 93 after a long illness, her agent has announced.
In a series of novels beginning with The Country Girls that were at first banned in Ireland but feted abroad, O’Brien gave voice to women struggling with the oppressive and hypocritical expectations of rural life. Her focus widened in later works such as House of Splendid Isolation and The Little Red Chairs, but always maintained the keen intelligence and daring that made Philip Roth once hail her as “the most gifted woman now writing fiction in English”.
Paying tribute to the author, her publisher, Faber, said she was “one of the greatest writers of our age”. “She revolutionised Irish literature, capturing the lives of women and the complexities of the human condition in prose that was luminous and spare, and which had a profound influence on so many writers who followed her.
“A defiant and courageous spirit, Edna constantly strove to break new artistic ground, to write truthfully, from a place of deep feeling. The vitality of her prose was a mirror of her zest for life: she was the very best company, kind, generous, mischievous, brave.
“Edna was a dear friend to us all, and we will miss her dreadfully. It is Faber’s huge privilege to publish her, and her bold and brilliant body of work lives on.”
Born in a village in County Clare in 1930, O’Brien was the youngest of a large family with a father who was a drinker and a gambler – a childhood she recalled as full of “money troubles, drink troubles, all sorts of troubles”. After qualifying as a pharmacist in 1950, she married the writer Ernest Gébler against her family’s wishes – a hurried decision she described in 2011 as going “from them, to him; from one house of control, to another”.
When the couple moved to London with their two sons in 1959, O’Brien started working as a reader for the publisher Hutchinson, which soon commissioned her to produce a novel.
Written in three weeks, The Country Girls crackles with wit and feeling as it follows Caithleen and Baba from dreaming of romance at their convent boarding school to abandonment in Dublin. When it was published in 1960, Kingsley Amis saluted its “unphony charm and unlaborious originality”, while it was greeted with consternation across the Irish Sea.
Writing in 2008, O’Brien said she had received anonymous letters, “all malicious”, and the “few copies purchased in Limerick were burnt after the rosary, one evening in the parish grounds, at the request of the priest”.
The novel was swiftly banned in Ireland, as were O’Brien’s next six novels, beginning with two sequels that completed The Country Girls’ inevitable trajectory: 1962’s The Lonely Girl, and 1964’s mordantly-titled Girls in Their Married Bliss.
O’Brien’s own marriage came to an end in 1967, but the fiction continued. A young girl is seduced by a priest in 1970’s A Pagan Place, a novel whose narrator addresses herself in the second person, while Time and Tide, published in 1992, offers a bleak portrait of a woman going through an awkward divorce and battling for custody of her two sons. Life as a single mother was hard, she remembered in 2011, “but I was able to do it. I seemed to have endless energy at the time: I could cook and clean, and write.”
House of Splendid Isolation, published months before the 1994 IRA ceasefire, marked a broadening of O’Brien’s concerns, with its story of an unlikely friendship between a terrorist and an elderly widow. Down By the River tackled controversies over abortion, while Wild Decembers examined the confrontation between modernity and tradition.
The Guardian
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