O'Brien's debut novel “The Country Girls” made her Ireland’s most notorious exile since James Joyce.
ADVERTISEMENTEdna O'Brien, Ireland's literary pride whose fearless novels about women’s struggles in her homeland scandalised the nation, has died aged 93.
Her debut novel “The Country Girls” was banned in Ireland but O’Brien later gained international acclaim as a storyteller and iconoclast that found her welcomed everywhere from Dublin to the White House.
O'Brien died Saturday after a long illness, according to a statement by her publisher Faber and the literary agency PFD.
“A defiant and courageous spirit, Edna constantly strove to break new artistic ground, to write truthfully, from a place of deep feeling,” Faber said in a statement.
“The vitality of her prose was a mirror of her zest for life: she was the very best company, kind, generous, mischievous, brave.”
She is survived by her sons, Marcus and Carlos.
Edna O’Brien: Ireland’s outlaw author
O'Brien published more than 20 books, most of them novels and story collections, and would know fully what she called the “extremities of joy and sorrow, love, crossed love and unrequited love, success and failure, fame and slaughter.”
Few so concretely and poetically challenged Ireland's religious, sexual and gender boundaries. Few wrote so fiercely and sensually about loneliness, rebellion, desire and persecution.
"O’Brien is attracted to taboos just as they break, to the place of greatest heat and darkness and, you might even say, danger to her mortal soul," Booker Prize winner Anne Enright wrote of her in UK paper the Guardian in 2012.
A world traveller in mind and body, O'Brien was as likely to imagine the longings of an Irish nun as to take in a man's “boyish smile” in the midst of a “ponderous London club."
She befriended movie stars and heads of state while also writing sympathetically about Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams and meeting with female farm workers in Nigeria who feared abduction by Boko Haram.
The Country Girls: O’Brien’s scandalous first novel
O'Brien was an unknown about to turn 30, living with her husband and two small children outside of London, when “The Country Girls” made her Ireland’s most notorious exile since James Joyce.
Written in just three weeks and published in 1960, “The Country Girls” follows the lives of two young women: Caithleen (Kate) Brady and Bridget (Baba) Brennan journey from a rural convent to the risks and adventures of Dublin.
Admirers were as caught up in their defiance and awakening as would-be censors were enraged by such passages as “He opened his braces and let his trousers slip down around the ankles” and “He patted my knees with his other hand. I was excited and warm and violent."
O'Brien's novel was praised and purchased in London and New York. At the same time, back in Ireland it was labelled “filth" by Minister of Justice Charles Haughey and burned publicly in O'Brien's hometown of Tuamgraney, County Clare.
ADVERTISEMENTDetractors also included O'Brien's parents and her husband, the author Ernest Gebler, from whom O'Brien was already becoming estranged.
Edna O’Brien: One of the most notable authors never to win a Nobel
O’Brien continued the stories of Kate and Baba in “The Lonely Girl” and “Girls in Their Married Bliss” and by the mid-1960s was single and enjoying the prime of ‘Swinging London’.
Enright would call O’Brien “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 was recognised well beyond the world of books. She dined at the White House with then-first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton and Jack Nicholson, and she befriended Jacqueline Kennedy.
ADVERTISEMENT
O’Brien’s boundary-breaking literary career lasted over half a century. In her story “The Love Object,” the narrator confronts her lust, and love, for an adulterous family man who need only say her name to make her legs tremble.
“A Scandalous Woman” follows the stifling of a lively young Irish nonconformist - part of that “small solidarity of scandalous women who had conceived children without securing fathers” - and ends with O’Brien’s condemning her country as a “land of shame, a land of murder and a land of strange sacrificial women.”
O’Brien is among the most notable authors never to win the Nobel or even the Booker Prize. Her honours did include an Irish Book Award for lifetime achievement, the PEN/Nabokov prize and the Frank O’Connor award in 2011 for her story collection “Saints and Sinners.”
Josephine Edna O’Brien was one of four children raised on a farm. Her father was a violent alcoholic, her mother a talented letter writer who disapproved of her daughter’s profession, possibly out of jealousy.
ADVERTISEMENTLike Kate and Baba in “The Country Girls,” O’Brien was educated in part at a convent during “dour years” made feverish by a disorienting crush she developed on one of the nuns.
