Edna O’Brien (1930-2024): Irish literary rebel who put the reader inside a woman’s skin

It is not that Irish women writers, until then, had not made a mark on the national consciousness. There were writers like Iris Murdoch, Elizabeth Bowen and Kate O’Brien, who had all written about women’s sexuality, but Edna O’Brien became the enfant terrible, the liberator and a beacon of defiance, who could not care less about the Catholic bishops and priests in De Valera’s regressive Ireland (a period described by Seán Ó’Faoláin’s as a ‘dreary Eden’) before it experienced the Enlightenment revolution in 1973 — the year it became a member of the European Union. Her work initially courted controversy and censorship, but ultimately revolutionised its literature and paved the way for generations of women writers, who felt empowered to tell their own stories in their distinct ways. Consider, for instance, Sally Rooney and Anne Enright, who explore Irish female sexuality with a fresh and contemporary perspective.

The Country Girls

Born in 1930 in County Clare, O’Brien’s rural upbringing and Catholic education provided the backdrop for her early novels, most notably The Country Girls trilogy. The first book in the series, The Country Girls, was published in 1960, years before Philip Larkin, in his poem ‘Annus Mirabilis’ (A Remarkable Year, in Latin), written at the height of the cultural revolution of the 1960s, infamously claimed that sex began in 1963, a year that he associated with two precise events — the end of the ban on DH Lawrence’s salacious novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover and the release of the Beatles’ debut LP, Please Please Me. The other two novels in the semi-autobiographical series include The Lonely Girl (1962) and Girls in Their Married Bliss (1964).

“I wakened quickly and sat up in bed abruptly. It is only when I am anxious that I waken easily and for a minute I did not know why my heart was beating faster than usual. Then I remembered. The old reason. He had not come home,” thus begins The Country Girls, the quintessential tale of Irish girlhood, which was banned for its frank depiction of female sexuality and critique of the Church’s influence on women’s lives. Its publication triggered a public outcry, a moral hysteria. A local parish priest burnt a copy. Male writers like Frank O’Connor and L. P. Hartley dismissed the novel’s women characters as “nymphomaniacs,” and slammed Edna O’Brien for her “poor taste in men.” The author became a national pariah, but also an “era-defining symbol of the struggle for Irish women’s voices to be heard above the clamour of an ultraconservative, ultrareligious, and institutionally misogynistic society,” as Eimear McBride, who wrote her radical and ingeniously experimental debut novel, A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing, when she was 27, writes in her Introduction to a compendium of the trilogy.

“With every aspect of women’s lives invaded by, and subject to, the whims of a state machine ideologically opposed to female emancipation — under the direction of a meticulously prurient Catholic Church — O’Brien’s invocation of female characters who dared desire more from life than the traditional domestic and sexual servitude, emotional disaffection, and intellectual abnegation was nothing short of revolutionary. Not only was O’Brien giving voice to the voiceless, she was washing the nation’s dirty laundry in public — laundry which has indeed proved so dirty that, more than fifty years after The Country Girls’ momentous publication, it is still proving in need of a rinse,” adds McBride.

The Country Girls introduced readers to Caithleen ‘Kate’ Brady and Bridget ‘Baba’ Brennan, two friends growing up in rural Ireland, yearning for escape from the stifling environment of their small village. Kate, who lives with her abusive father and gentle mother, finds solace in books. Baba, daughter of the local vet, is brash and confident, often bullying Kate while secretly relying on her friendship. After Kate’s mother’s death, both girls are sent to a convent school, where they forge a bond that sees them through their teenage years.

Their expulsion from the convent leads them to Dublin, where The Lonely Girl picks up their story. Baba embraces the city’s nightlife and men, while Kate falls for an older, enigmatic Frenchman, Mr. Gentleman. Their relationship is a whirlwind of passion and longing, but ultimately ends in heartbreak. Girls in Their Married Bliss fast-forwards to their lives in London, both married and disillusioned. Baba’s marriage is a sham, while Kate’s is bedevilled by emotional distance and her husband’s possessiveness. A poignant — and often disillusioning — look at the challenges women faced in their personal and professional lives, The Country Girls trilogy was a landmark in Irish literature. It gave a voice to female experiences that had been previously muzzled and marginalised.

August is a Wicked Month

O’Brien’s career spanned over six decades, during which she produced a rich and varied body of work. Her fourth novel, August is a Wicked Month (1965), which was banned in several countries, is a powerful and evocative portrait of loneliness and longing that captures a woman’s search for connection in a world that often feels hollow, especially those with broken relationships, with a damaged sense of self. It delves into the inner turmoil of Ellen, a young Irish divorcee seeking solace and adventure through a series of fleeting encounters during a solitary vacation (‘a jaunt into iniquity’) in London and the French Riviera, leaving behind her stale life, and their son with his father. Sample this paragraph in which O’Brien writes about Ellen with a taciturn male companion on a date at the River Thames:

“He smiled forgiveness, and then stretched the rug forward to cover her head, and when both their heads were engulfed by the rug he let go of it and he put his arms round her and took her mouth and felt it at first with his outer lips and then with the inside of those lips which was far softer. Their tongues wound round and round in a perfect, dizzying rhythm and he told her to open her mouth wide and wider. She received him right back the length of her mouth to her taste buds and although she feared choking she also thought she was sampling some beautiful fruit she had never known before. Her bones were singing away and the taste in her mouth was of magic. When they needed to breathe he lifted the rug back and put it like a veil around his face, and they were free to breathe for a minute and to watch.”

As the month progresses, Ellen’s experiences lead her to a deeper understanding of herself and her place in the world. The liberating promise of her holiday ultimately gives way to a sobering realisation of the limits imposed by her circumstances. Ellen’s liaisons in France are marked by a mixture of passion and regret. The shimmering heat of August becomes a metaphor for the simmering tensions bubbling within Ellen — the tension between the pursuit of pleasure and the longing for meaningful connection. She struggles to reconcile her need for intimacy with her desire for independence. In the end, Ellen returns to London, carrying with her the weight of her experiences and a renewed, albeit complicated, sense of self.

What I found fascinating about the novel is the way it reinforces how, even in the midst of beauty and freedom, there can be a profound sense of emptiness. It is a testament to O’Brien’s skill as a writer that she can make us feel both the warmth of the sun on our skin and the chill of isolation and abandonment in our souls. August is a Wicked Month is a must-read for anyone who has ever longed for connection, felt the urge to run away from the quotidian or questioned his/her place in the world.

The Lives of Girls, and Women

O’Brien’s short stories, collected in volumes like Saints and Sinners, showcased her mastery of language and her ability to capture the nuances of human relationships. In her memoir, Country Girl, she writes candidly about her reflections on her own life — her early impressions of her family’s home, Cnoc na Gaoithe, which was full of prayer books and religious treasuries, her years at the convent and in reading, the carefree abandon of the youth, writerly ambition, the debauchery of Dublin, sexcapades and shots at love (including the unrequited kind), elopement with Irish-Czech writer Ernest Gébler, whom he married later against her parent’s wishes in the summer of 1954, divorce, single-motherhood and hobnobbing with the who’s who in London and the Hollywood giants on her trips to America. It was amidst the fading splendour of her decaying house, where a young Edna experienced a sense of isolation and longing for a world beyond the confines of her upbringing.

O’Brien’s play, Virginia, is based on Virginia Woolf’s life and relationships with her husband, Leonard, and her lover, Vita Sackville-West. Her 2019 novel, Girl, which begins with the haunting sentence, “I was a girl once, but not anymore,” and narrates the harrowing travails of the young women abducted by Boko Haram, is simply unforgettable; it sears itself in your memory. Reflecting on the reasons the three slim novels in The Country Girls trilogy have grown in stature, McBride argues that it’s because they set a precedent and raised a flag, drawing ‘a line in the sand.’ She writes: “Into bodies raised to the expectation of violence, rape, forced pregnancy, innumerable dangerous childbirths, domestic bondage, and the ever-present risk of institutionalisation for intentionally, or unintentionally, bringing social shame on male relations, she breathed the radical oxygen of choice, desire, and sensual delight.”

She adds: “To minds shackled by the many Machiavellian impositions of religious prohibition, institutional contempt, and unquestioning denigration of female intellect, she sang the song of awareness, dissent, and the necessity of searching out better, and more. O’Brien’s girls succeed, and do not succeed, in overcoming their internal and external obstacles. The point is that they never stop grappling with the terms of their lives, and the author, in her turn, never relegates their status within those lives to that of best supporting actress. These are always the stories of two young women going out into life, the histories they bring along with them, and the futures they create for themselves on the way.”