Edna O’Brien, Ireland‘s literary pride and outlaw who scandalised her native land with her debut novel ‘The Country Girls‘ before gaining international acclaim as a storyteller and iconoclast that found her welcomed everywhere from Dublin to the White House, has died. She was 93. O’Brien died Saturday after a long illness, said her publisher Faber and literary agency PFD.She is survived by her sons, Marcus and Carlos.
O’Brien published over 20 books, most 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, so sensually about loneliness, rebellion, desire and persecution.
She befriended movie stars and heads of states while also writing sympathetically about Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams and meeting with farm workers in Nigeria who feared abduction by Boko Haram.
O’Brien was an unknown about to turn 30, living with her husband and two children outside of London, when ‘The Country Girls’ made her Ireland’s most notorious exile since James Joyce. Written in three weeks and published in 1960 for an advance of roughly $75, ‘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 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.” Her novel was praised in London and New York while in Ireland it was labeled “filth” and burned publicly. Detractors included O’Brien’s parents and husband, author Ernest Gebler, from whom she was already estranged.
She continued the stories of Kate and Baba in ‘The Lonely Girl’ and ‘Girls in Their Married Bliss’ and by mid- 1960s was single and enjoying the prime of “Swinging London”: whether socialising with Princess Margaret and Marianne Faithfull, or having a fling with actor Robert Mitchum. Paul McCartney once escorted her home, picked up her son’s guitar and improvised a song with lines on O’Brien: “She’ll have you sighing/She’ll have you crying/Hey/She’ll blow your mind away.”
O’Brien is among the most notable authors never to win the Nobel or 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.
O’Brien published over 20 books, most 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, so sensually about loneliness, rebellion, desire and persecution.
She befriended movie stars and heads of states while also writing sympathetically about Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams and meeting with farm workers in Nigeria who feared abduction by Boko Haram.
O’Brien was an unknown about to turn 30, living with her husband and two children outside of London, when ‘The Country Girls’ made her Ireland’s most notorious exile since James Joyce. Written in three weeks and published in 1960 for an advance of roughly $75, ‘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 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.” Her novel was praised in London and New York while in Ireland it was labeled “filth” and burned publicly. Detractors included O’Brien’s parents and husband, author Ernest Gebler, from whom she was already estranged.
She continued the stories of Kate and Baba in ‘The Lonely Girl’ and ‘Girls in Their Married Bliss’ and by mid- 1960s was single and enjoying the prime of “Swinging London”: whether socialising with Princess Margaret and Marianne Faithfull, or having a fling with actor Robert Mitchum. Paul McCartney once escorted her home, picked up her son’s guitar and improvised a song with lines on O’Brien: “She’ll have you sighing/She’ll have you crying/Hey/She’ll blow your mind away.”
O’Brien is among the most notable authors never to win the Nobel or 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.
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