O'Brien, Edna 1932–

PERSONAL: Born December 15, 1932, in Tuamgraney, County Clare, Ireland; daughter of Michael and Lena (maiden name, Cleary) O'Brien; married Ernest Gébler (an author), 1952 (divorced, 1964); children: Sasha, Carlos (sons). Education: Attended Pharmaceutical College of Ireland. Hobbies and other interests: Reading, remembering.

ADDRESSES: Office—Fraser & Dunlop Scripts Ltd., 91 Regent St., London W1, England. Agent—c/o Curtis Brown Group Ltd., Haymarket House, 28-29 Haymarket, London SW1Y 4SP, England.

CAREER: Novelist, short story writer, playwright, and screenwriter. City College, New York, NY, creative writing instructor.

MEMBER: American Academy of Arts and Letters (honorary).

AWARDS, HONORS: Kingsley Amis Award, 1962; Yorkshire Post Book of the Year Award, 1970, for A Pagan Place; Los Angeles Times Book Award, 1990, for Lantern Slides, and 1992, for Time and Tide.

WRITINGS:

NOVELS

The Country Girls (also see below), Knopf (New York, NY), 1960.

The Lonely Girl (also see below), Random House (New York, NY), 1962, published as The Girl with Green Eyes, Penguin (London, England), 1964.

Girls in Their Married Bliss (also see below), J. Cape (London, England), 1964, reprinted, Plume (New York, NY), 2003.

August Is a Wicked Month (also see below), Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 1965.

Casualties of Peace (also see below), J. Cape (London, England), 1966.

A Pagan Place, (also see below), Weidenfeld & Nicolson (London, England), 1970, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 2001.

Zee and Company, (also see below), Weidenfeld & Nicolson (London, England), 1971.

Night: A Novel, Knopf (New York, NY), 1972, reprinted, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 2001.

Johnny I Hardly Knew You (also see below), Weiden-feld & Nicolson (London, England), 1977, published as I Hardly Knew You, Doubleday (New York, NY), 1978.

Seven Novels and Other Short Stories, Collins (London, England), 1978.

The Country Girls Trilogy and Epilogue (contains The Country Girls, The Lonely Girl, and Girls in Their Married Bliss), Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 1986, published as The Country Girls Trilogy: Second Epilogue, Dutton (New York, NY), 1989.

The High Road (novel), Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 1988.

Time and Tide, Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 1992.

House of Splendid Isolation, Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 1994.

An Edna O'Brien Reader (contains August Is a Wicked Month, Casualties of Peace, and Johnny I Hardly Knew You), Warner Books (New York, NY), 1994.

Down by the River, Weidenfeld & Nicolson (London, England), 1996.

Wild Decembers, [London, England], 1999, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 2000.

In the Forest, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 2002.

SHORT STORIES

The Love Object, J. Cape (London, England), 1968.

A Scandalous Woman, and Other Stories, Harcourt (New York, NY), 1974.

Mrs. Reinhardt, and Other Stories, Weidenfeld & Nicolson (London, England), 1978, published as A Rose in the Heart, Doubleday (New York, NY), 1979.

Returning, Weidenfeld & Nicolson (London, England), 1982.

A Fanatic Heart: Selected Stories of Edna O'Brien, foreword by Philip Roth, Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 1984.

Lantern Slides: Stories, Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 1990.

Also author of Stories of Joan of Arc, 1984.

JUVENILE

The Dazzle, illustrated by Peter Stevenson, Hodder & Stoughton (London, England), 1981.

A Christmas Treat (sequel to The Dazzle), illustrated by Stevenson, Hodder & Stoughton (London, England), 1982.

The Expedition, Hodder & Stoughton (London, England), 1982.

The Rescue, illustrated by Stevenson, Hodder & Stoughton (London, England), 1983.

Tales for the Telling: Irish Folk and Fairy Stories, illustrated by Michael Foreman, Atheneum (New York, NY), 1986.

PLAYS

A Cheap Bunch of Nice Flowers (produced in London, England, 1962), Ungar (New York, NY), 1963.

(With others) Oh! Calcutta!, produced in New York, 1969), Grove (New York, NY), 1969.

A Pagan Place (produced in the West End, 1972), Knopf (New York, NY), 1970.

The Ladies, produced in London, England, 1975.

The Gathering, produced in Dublin, Ireland, 1974, produced in New York at Manhattan Theatre Club, 1977.

Virginia (produced in Stratford, Ontario, Canada, 1980, produced in London, England, and New York, 1985), Harcourt (New York, NY), 1981, revised edition, 1985.

Flesh and Blood, produced in Bath, England, 1985, produced in New York, 1986.

Madame Bovary (based on the novel by Gustave Flaubert), produced at the Palace, Watford, England, 1987.

Our Father, produced in London, England, 1999.

SCREENPLAYS

The Girl with Green Eyes (based on O'Brien's novel The Lonely Girl), Lopert, 1964.

Three into Two Won't Go, Universal, 1969.

X Y and Zee (based on O'Brien's novel Zee and Company), Columbia, 1972.

Also author of (with Desmond Davis) I Was Happy Here, 1965, revised, 1979; (with others) The Tempter, 1975; A Woman at the Seaside, 1979; The Wicked Lady, 1979; and The Country Girls, 1984.

OTHER

Mother Ireland, photographs by Fergus Bourke, Har-court (New York, NY), 1976.

Arabian Days, photographs by Gerard Klijn, Horizon Press (New York, NY), 1977.

The Collected Edna O'Brien (miscellany), Collins (London, England), 1978.

(Editor) Some Irish Loving: A Selection, Harper (New York, NY), 1979.

James and Nora: A Portrait of Joyce's Marriage, Lord John Press (Northridge, CA), 1981.

Vanishing Ireland, photographs by Richard Fitzgerald, J. Cape (London, England), 1986, Potter (New York, NY), 1987.

On the Bone (poetry), Greville Press, 1989.

James Joyce (biography; "Penguin Lives" series), Viking (New York, NY), 1999.

Also contributor to magazines, including New Yorker, Ladies' Home Journal, and Cosmopolitan, and to various English journals.

Author of television plays, including The Wedding Dress, 1963; The Keys to the Café, 1965; Give My Love to the Pilchards, 1965; Which of These Two Ladies Is He Married To?, 1967; Nothing's Ever Over, 1968; Then and Now, 1973; and Mrs. Reinhardt, from Her Own Story, 1981.

ADAPTATIONS: Works adapted for audio include Wild Decembers (four cassettes), read by Suzanne Bertish, Houghton Mifflin.

SIDELIGHTS: Irish author Edna O'Brien is "renowned for her anguished female characters, lonely Catholic girls in search of adventure, or single, older women in wretched affairs with married men," wrote Richard B. Woodward in New York Times Magazine. "A poet of heartbreak, she writes most tellingly about the hopeless, angry passion that courts self-ruin." Her women are loving, but frustrated, betrayed, lonely, and struggling to escape the role society has assigned them, while her male characters are cruel, cold, drunken, and irresponsible. The divorced mother of two, O'Brien knows about struggle, heartbreak, and pain firsthand. She has used her personal experiences, especially her childhood in Ireland, as sources for many of her works, drawing on her memories to evoke the emotions of her readers. An author of novels, short stories, plays, biographies, and children's books, she is a prolific writer, often considered controversial, who appeals to many types of audiences.

O'Brien was born in Tuamgraney, County Clare, a small, rural, devoutly Catholic village of about 200 people in the west of Ireland. Raised on a farm, she grew up in an area where everyone knew everyone else's secrets, business, and problems. She claims this has helped her in her writing, telling Amanda Smith in Publishers Weekly, "I had sort of a limitless access to everyone's life story. For a writer, it's a marvelous chance." Educated first at the local national school and then in a convent, she escaped rural life by attending Pharmaceutical College in Dublin. In 1952, she eloped with Czech-Irish author Ernest Gébler. They moved first to County Wicklow and then to London where O'Brien has remained. They divorced after twelve years, and she raised their two sons alone.

Books were scarce in O'Brien's childhood, and it was not until she was in Dublin that she began to take an interest in them. Introducing James Joyce by T.S. Eliot was among her first purchases, and she recalled in Lear's that "reading it was the most astonishing literary experience of my life…. What I learned from that brief extract from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was that as a writer one must take one's material from life, from the simple, indisputable, and often painful world about one, and give it somehow its transfiguration, but at the same time shave all excess and untruth from it, like peeling a willow. What I did not know, although I must have sensed it, was that this would bring me into conflict with parents, friends, and indeed the Irish establishment."

Conflict and writing seemed to go hand in hand for O'Brien throughout her career. The birth of her first published novel, The Country Girls, heralded the death of her marriage. Written at the age of twenty-six and published in 1960, The Country Girls broke new ground in Irish literature giving a frank speaking voice to women characters. The subject matter and especially the daringly graphic sexual scenes caused this book, and the six that followed, to be banned in Ireland. It was the first novel in what became a trilogy; The Lonely Girl and Girls in Their Married Bliss completed the set. The three novels were collected in The Country Girls Trilogy and Epilogue, published in 1986.

"It's a difficult trip, this coming of age," wrote Mary Rourke in the Los Angeles Times Book Review of The Country Girls Trilogy and Epilogue. "Two girls set adrift, misdirected, lost at sea. O'Brien tells it with love and outrage, compassion and contempt." The stories revolve around two young women, the "country girls" Kate and Baba, who search for love and sex in a series of tragicomic adventures after being expelled from their convent school. "Miss O'Brien's outlook is intemperate, like Irish weather. She's fond of blarney, but a bleak, literary kind, more in the mood of the later Yeats than of Celtic charm," commented Anatole Broyard, writing in the New York Times Book Review. "She has no patience with the ordinary, the soothing monotony of innocent small events." Feelings of loss, conflict, and disappointment in love pervade each novel of the trilogy as the girls try to attain their dreams. Village Voice contributor Terrence Rafferty observed that "the psychological insights are sharp, the descriptions graceful and resonant."

O'Brien added the epilogue to the trilogy when the stories were released in one volume. Rafferty explained that it "brings the story full circle, back to earth, in a tragedy that would be unbearable were it not for the exuberance of the writing, the hope engendered by language that goes on and on." The epilogue is presented as Baba's soliloquy, a retrospective view of both women's lives. Broyard, commenting on the entire collection, noted that "everyday scenes … are the truest and best parts of Miss O'Brien's work. Reading them, we wonder whether love and sex, for which she has become an ambivalent apologist, are her natural subject after all—or just a burlesque to keep the genuine terrors at bay."

Many of O'Brien's short stories have also been assembled and published as collections, including A Fanatic Heart: Selected Stories of Edna O'Brien. Covering two decades of her career, the twenty-nine stories in this collection explore the themes of childhood, love, and loss, all from a woman's perspective. "Most of the stories in A Fanatic Heart are set down in languorous, elegiac prose," commented Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times, adding that "they're enlivened by Miss O'Brien's earthy humor and her sense of place." She writes of relationships, exile, and betrayal, drawing the reader in by seeming to reveal herself. Tales such as "My Mother's Mother," describing the "ghastly" death of her grandfather one night while saying the Rosary, evoke O'Brien's native Ireland. Others explore the temptations of the flesh in strictly-reared young women, as in "The Connor Girls," or contrast girls with carousing drunks, as in "Irish Revel." Still others concern affairs, mental breakdown, and entrapment in bad marriages. In the Los Angeles Times Book Review, Charles Champlin commented, "She writes with a graceful, poetical simplicity, a soft and mesmerizing brogue audible in every cadence." Washington Post Book World contributor Jonathan Yardley concluded by saying, "It's all there: the violence, the superstition, the craziness, the drink, the brooding religion, the terrorized women. O'Brien's Ireland is as hard and unremitting a place as O'Connor's South. Yet longings her women feel for love and peace, for a kind connection with another human being, give these stories a tenderness that is both surprising and enriching."

O'Brien presents another side of Ireland in Tales for the Telling: Irish Folk and Fairy Stories, a book for children published in 1986. Twelve stories reveal a land of fairy folk, giants, castles, princes and princesses, magic, and heroes. A fierce wolf and a young boy dance to the magic tune of fife music in one tale, and another tells of a giant who betters an opponent with help from his cunning wife. O'Brien writes her stories in standard English, using the characters' conversations to express their Irish descent. "In the dialogue she revels in the glories of local dialect," wrote Elizabeth MacCallum in the Toronto Globe and Mail, "and in her descriptive passages she evokes wondrous visions." Another critic, Times Literary Supplement contributor Patricia Craig, remarked that O'Brien's stories correspond rather closely to those published in Donegal Fairy Stories written by Seumas MacManus, but commented that O'Brien's tales "are notable for their decorativeness and sturdy vocabulary." Diane Roback wrote in Publishers Weekly that the "color-rich, vigorous paintings" by Michael Foreman complement "a collection for the entire family [that] fires the imagination."

O'Brien examines more than Ireland in her various writings. In two stage plays, she focuses on Virginia Woolf, and Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary. "O'Brien … knows how to create climax, epiphany and incandescence by compression," observed Jack Kroll in Newsweek, discussing the play Virginia. In the play, the story of Woolf, one of the Bloomsbury group and a prominent literary figure, encompasses her life from her birth in 1882 to her suicide in 1942. Woolf's "intense subjective style" is echoed throughout the piece, often transcending "chronological narrative," wrote Lawrence Christon in the Los Angeles Times. "Virginia is virtually a monologue," Christon continued, noting that the play "is top-heavy with talk."

Madame Bovary is similar to Virginia, particularly in its use of time and narration. O'Brien claims the title character as her own creation rather than an adaptation of Flaubert's novel. This is a story of love, marriage, boredom, adultery, and death by suicide, and O'Brien's work closely follows Flaubert's piece. The drama takes place in Emma Bovary's mind, even juggling the events as if they were really memories happening in her head, giving the audience clear access to her thoughts and emotions. Observer contributor Michael Ratcliffe remarked, "Edna O'Brien has turned Flaubert's novel into a tasteful melodrama whose tragic ironies shine sharp and bright." But, Ratcliffe noted, the "dramatic narrative unfolds in a series of sketches and jerks…. Time-leaps and chronology are not always clear." Irving Wardle, writing in the London Times, pointed out that "the action unrolls as if by flashes of lightning … the effect is to present an ever-strengthening sequence of hopes and defeats in which grand emotions are brought tumbling down."

While continuing to publish books for children, short stories, and plays, O'Brien waited ten years after Johnny I Hardly Knew You before publishing another novel. The long-awaited volume, The High Road, concerns Anna, a middle-aged, successful Irish writer recovering from the breakup of an affair. She escapes to an unidentified Spanish island, hoping to take time to write in her diary and repair her broken heart. "This is a disorderly novel about the disorder of human needs and the grotesqueries of appetite, how unsuitable, how inappropriate our longings often are, how difficult it is to find even a moment of pure unspoiled happiness," said Carol Shields in the Toronto Globe and Mail. Many critics seemed to share this viewpoint, with Publishers Weekly contributor Sybil Steinberg calling The High Road "a disappointing narrative." "At its best O'Brien's prose is, as usual, eloquent and passionate, but it cannot disguise the fundamental confusion of this strange little book," wrote Yardley in the Washington Post. "There are enough bright moments in it to reward O'Brien's most devoted followers, but few other readers are likely to take any pleasure in trying to make connections between characters that O'Brien herself never makes."

"Raise a jar to Edna O'Brien herself, back among us from foreign parts … the black mood of The High Road all but dispelled," wrote Elaine Kendall in the Los Angeles Times in her discussion of Lantern Slides: Stories. "She is at her best again, telling of people and places close to her heart." With Lantern Slides, O'Brien returns to the short story. "Though she covers little new ground here, she also digs deeper into the old ground than ever before, unearthing a rich archeology," commented David Leavitt in the New York Times Book Review. The title story, "Lantern Slides," was highly praised by many critics, Leavitt labeling it the "collection's masterpiece." Regarding the entire collection, Victoria Glendinning wrote in the London Times that "this is good writing; and good thinking." Times Literary Supplement contributor Louise Doughty praised Lantern Slides, writing that "the same precision with which she portrays landscape is applied to human emotions; there isn't a single character in these stories who is unconvincing. O'Brien continues to display acute powers of observation in a prose that is always neat and often immaculate."

House of Splendid Isolation departed somewhat from the author's usual terrain. The story of an IRA terrorist who takes an elderly woman, Josie, hostage, the novel directly engages the contemporary political struggles in Northern Ireland. Writing in the New York Times Book Review, John L'Heureux maintained that the novel's two distinct components are not successfully fused. "Uncomfortable with her story of the terrorist and the lady, Ms. O'Brien seeks refuge in easy symbolism, and her art is swallowed up in rhetoric." Still, noted L'Heu-reux, O'Brien excels in portraying Josie's world: "The author is comfortable here. She understands the blindness and desperation of these characters and she gets inside them with devastating effects." Focusing on the author's achievement in telling the story of modern Ireland, Chicago Tribune Books reviewer Andy Solomon remarked, "Moving beyond her stunningly wrought landscapes of private heartbreak and haunted agony, in this novel O'Brien shows us the land that forged her vision."

O'Brien's confessional tone and use of the first person in many of her novels has led to speculation concerning the distance between her life and her fiction. In the Dictionary of Literary Biography, Patricia Boyle Haberstroh quoted an interview between Ludovic Kennedy and O'Brien in which the author said her life and her work are "quite close, but they're not as close as they seem…. I think writing, especially semi-autobiographical writing, is the life you might have liked to have had." In an interview with Woodward, O'Brien concluded: "All I know is that I want to write about something that has no fashion and that does not pander to any period or to a journalistic point of view. I want to write about something that would apply to any time because it's a state of the soul." O'Brien also discussed her writing in Lear's, noting that "the need to write becomes as intrinsic as the need to breathe. I believe that the hidden reason is to do with time and emotion and the retrieval of both. It is as if the life lived has not been lived until it is set down in this unconscious sequence of words."

O'Brien's novel Down by the River is based on the actual case of an Irish girl who became pregnant by a friend of her father, and the theme of the book is the abortion issue in Ireland. In the novel, however, the girl, Mary, becomes pregnant as a result of her father's sexual abuse. The story begins with the father assaulting her for the first time, an act he repeats with more frequency and violence after Mary's mother dies. After returning from London with a neighbor who helps her with the termination of her pregnancy, Mary and the friend are arrested. Her life is torn apart by politicians and anti-abortion advocates who do not know that Mary's father was responsible for the pregnancy. Jose Lanters wrote in World Literature Today that Down by the River makes the point "about the involvement of church and state in what are often very painful and tragic personal circumstances."

World of Hibernia contributor John McCourt wrote that in James Joyce, O'Brien "puts her critical heritage, her vast experience as a novelist and short-story writer, and her dazzling linguistic skills to excellent use in this biography, which will be remembered for its panache, verve, readability, and its humane understanding of Joyce and of the Irish world that formed him." Booklist reviewer Mary Carroll noted that O'Brien "also provides thoughtful appreciations of Joyce's major works." Contemporary Review contributor John McGurk said that O'Brien reveals "Joyce's love/hate relationship with Dublin and Ireland, with the 'Rock of Rome,' the English Crown, the legal profession: and between home and exile, then his other innermost conflicts between lust and love, order and chaos, family restrictions and the free-booting spirit at odds with the tenacity with which he pursued his life as a writer."

New York Times Book Review contributor Robert Sullivan called James Joyce "a hardheaded hagiography in which [O'Brien] spends a lot of time knocking Joyce around, especially the early Joyce, the Joyce who would run into you at the pub, go on about his imminent greatness, pity you, and then hit you up for a couple of quid on his way out…. After she's roughed Joyce up," wrote Sullivan, "she raises his hand in the air and proclaims him a genius…. Not since Anthony Burgess has anyone so gorgeously sung such praise for a man whose work, let's fact it, can seem incomprehensible to the noninfatuated." Sullivan concluded by saying that "O'Brien's triumph is that while celebrating Joyce and his ecstatic quest to lay image on counterimage … she has drawn the desperation and sadness of the man whose name means joy."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Concise Dictionary of British Literary Biography, Volume 8: Contemporary Writers, 1960—Present, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1992.

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), Volume 3, 1975, Volume 5, 1976, Volume 8, 1978, Volume 13, 1980, Volume 36, 1986, Volume 65, 1991.

Contemporary Novelists, sixth edition, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1996.

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 14: British Novelists since 1960, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1983.

Eckley, Grace, Edna O'Brien, Bucknell University Press (Lewisburg, PA), 1974.

Feminist Writers, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1996.

Staley, Thomas F., editor, Twentieth-Century Women Novelists, Barnes & Noble (Totowa, NJ), 1982.

PERIODICALS

America, April 15, 1995, p. 35.

Atlantic Monthly, July, 1965.

Belles Lettres, fall, 1992, p. 2.

Booklist, January 1, 1998, review of Down by the River, p. 731; October 1, 1999, Mary Carroll, review of James Joyce, p. 338; February 1, 2000, Grace Fill, review of Wild Decembers, p. 996.

Books, June, 1965.

Books and Bookmen, December, 1964.

Chicago Tribune Book World, December 9, 1984, p. 31.

Commonweal, May 5, 2000, Molly Winans, "A Dark Tale, Told in Singing Prose," p. 19.

Contemporary Review, July, 2000, John McGurk, "Edna O'Brien on James Joyce," p. 56.

Entertainment Weekly, April 14, 2000, "The Week," p. 68.

Globe and Mail (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), December 17, 1988; December 31, 1988.

Lear's, July, 1992, pp. 62-65.

Library Journal, October 1, 1999, Shelley Cox, review of James Joyce, p. 92.

Los Angeles Times, April 3, 1979; May 1, 1986; December 16, 1988; June 8, 1990.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, June 30, 1985, p. 1; January 19, 1986, p. 4; April 27, 1986, p. 4; September 2, 1990, p. 9; October 31, 1999, review of James Joyce, p. 10.

Ms., November, 1988, pp. 76, 78.

National Observer, June 21, 1965.

New Statesman & Society, April 15, 1994, p. 41.

Newsweek, March 18, 1985, p. 72.

New Yorker, June 27, 1994, p. 195.

New York Review of Books, June 3, 1965; August 24, 1967; January 31, 1985, p. 17; December 16, 1999, John Banville, "The Motherless Child," p. 48.

New York Times, November 12, 1984, Michiko Kaku-tani, review of A Fanatic Heart: Selected Stories of Edna O'Brien; March 1, 1985; May 30, 1990.

New York Times Book Review, March 26, 1967; February 9, 1969; September 22, 1974; June 27, 1978; February 11, 1979; November 18, 1984, pp. 1, 38; May 11, 1986, p. 12; March 1, 1987, p. 31; November 20, 1988, p. 11; June 25, 1990, p. 9; June 26, 1994, p. 7; March 22, 1998, review of Down by the River, p. 32; January 9, 2000, Robert Sullivan, "Oh Joist, Poor Joist," p. 6; April 9, 2000, Brooke Allen, "The Last of His Kind," p. 7.

New York Times Magazine, March 12, 1989, Richard B. Woodward.

Observer, February 8, 1987.

People Weekly, April 17, 1978; May 1, 2000, Jean Reynolds, review of Wild Decembers, p. 41.

Publishers Weekly, November 28, 1986, Diane Roback, review of Tales for the Telling: Irish Folk and Fairy Stories, p. 71; December 26, 1986, Amanda Smith, "Edna O'Brien's Magic," p. 30; September 9, 1988, Sybil Steinberg, review of The High Road, p. 122; April 25, 1994, review of House of Splendid Isolation, p. 56; January 31, 2000, review of Wild Decembers, p. 77; June 5, 2000, review of Wild Decembers, p. 61.

Saturday Review, June 5, 1965; March 25, 1967.

Spectator, October 9, 1999, review of Wild Decembers, p. 42.

Studies in Short Fiction, summer, 1993, Kiera O'Hara, "Love Objects: Love and Obsession in the Short Stories of Edna O'Brien," pp. 317-325; spring 1995, Jeanette Roberts Schumaker, "Sacrificial Women in Short Stories by Mary Lavin and Edna O'Brien," pp. 185-197.

Time, April 17, 2000, Paul Gray, "Perils of the Rustic Life: Wild Decembers Portrays a Simmering Irish Feud," p. 82.

Times (London, England), February 6, 1987; October 14, 1988; October 27, 1988; June 7, 1990.

Times Literary Supplement, April 23, 1982, p. 456; January 9, 1987, p. 46; October 28, 1988, p. 1212; June 8, 1990, p. 616; September 18, 1992, p. 23; April 22, 1994, p. 22.

Tribune Books (Chicago, IL), November 20, 1988, p. 6; May 27, 1990, p. 1; July 24, 1994, p. 1.

Variety, December 13, 1999, Matt Wolf, review of Our Father, p. 119.

Village Voice, July 1, 1985, Terrence Rafferty, review of The Country Girls Trilogy and Epilogue, p. 61.

Vogue, September 1, 1971.

Wall Street Journal, March 31, 2000, Kate Flatley, review of Wild Decembers, p. 10.

Washington Post, November 2, 1988.

Washington Post Book World, November 25, 1984, Jonathan Yardley, review of A Fanatic Heart, p. 3; August 21, 1994, p. 3.

World Literature Today, winter, 1998, Jose Lanters, review of Down by the River, p. 135.

World of Hibernia, fall, 1999, John McCourt, "Edna O'Brien: James Joyce," p. 92.

ONLINE

Salon.com, http://www.salon.com/ (December 2, 1995), "Lit Chat."