O'Brien, Edna (1930—)

Irish writer, best known for her controversial novel The Country Girls. Born Edna O'Brien in Tuamgraney, County Clare, Ireland, on December 15, 1930; daughter of Michael O'Brien and Lena Cleary O'Brien; educated at Scariff National School; attended Convent of Mercy, Loughrea, Galway, and Pharmaceutical College of Ireland; married Ernest Gebler (a novelist), in 1951 (divorced 1964); children: two sons, Carlos and Sasha.

Awards:

Kingsley Amis Award (1962); Yorkshire Post Award (1971).

Born in Tuamgraney, County Clare, Ireland, in 1930, Edna O'Brien wrote from an early age, despite the fact that her mother "had a detestation of literature," said O'Brien, "she'd allow no books in the house." It was her teacher at Scariff National School who encouraged her. After her arrival in Dublin in the late 1940s to study pharmacy, O'Brien bought a cheap, introductory selection of James Joyce edited by T.S. Eliot. It was a turning point. Joyce was to have a powerful influence on O'Brien's work, and the character of Molly Bloom continued to fascinate her. In 1981, O'Brien wrote a book about Joyce's marriage to Nora Barnacle Joyce ; as well, her short story "Irish Revel" and her novel Down by the River (1996) both pay homage to Joyce's short story "The Dead."

O'Brien was encouraged to write professionally by Peadar O'Donnell, editor of The Bell, Ireland's leading literary journal, and by her husband, the novelist Ernest Gebler, whom she married in 1951. They moved to London in 1959 and within weeks of her arrival O'Brien had written her first novel, The Country Girls (1960). "To be on an island," O'Brien wrote in 1976, "makes you realise that it is going to be harder to escape and that it will involve another birth, a further breach of waters. Nevertheless, an agitation to go." The move to London gave her the necessary perspective of distance that enabled her to write about Ireland. The Country Girls "wrote itself; my arm held the pen," she claimed. In the book, and its two sequels The Lonely Girl (1962) and Girls in Their Married Bliss (1964), O'Brien gave voice to Irish female sexuality in her exploration of the emotional and erotic experiences of Caithleen Brady and her friend Baba. When O'Brien revised Girls in Their Married Bliss in 1967, Caithleen decides to be sterilized as a protest against male betrayal. The books were banned in Ireland (The Country Girls was described as a "smear on Irish womanhood") under the stringent censorship legislation that was not relaxed until the late 1960s. Around then, O'Brien wrote five plays for television, as well as screenplays of some of her novels and short stories. She also contributed to Kenneth Tynan's erotic revue Oh! Calcutta! In the 1970s, she turned her attention to the theater and wrote three plays which were produced in London, Dublin and New York.

O'Brien says that her writing, which she describes as an "insane impulse," comes from "desperation…. Inspiration usually comes from some alarming, visceral experience. Words have to be picked with the point of a sword…. A writer is free to tell us what he or she sees. There are lines which express this, 'swift as the lightning in the collied dark', I think they capture what it is to be a writer." Memory was her strongest ally: "The further I went away from the past, the more clearly I returned inwardly." In addition to Joyce, Chekhov, whom she describes as "the truest voice I would ever know," has strongly influenced her work, as has Yeats (she wrote a screenplay about his great muse, Maud Gonne ).

Catholicism has also had a major influence on O'Brien's work. Reared in the rigid, puritanical Catholicism of pre-Vatican II Ireland, she has referred to the "inherited mantle of guilt" that is the legacy of the Irish Church. She was brought up as a "fervent Catholic and every ounce of indoctrination was charged with punishment," though she acknowledged that this also encouraged "a furtive desire, a wild and over-fertile fantasy life." Her relationship to Ireland is complex. Her real quarrel with Ireland, she wrote in Mother Ireland (1976), began after she left in 1959: "I thought of how it had warped me, and those around me, and their parents before them, all stooped by a variety of fears—fear of church, fear of phantoms, fear of ridicule, fear of hunger … and fear of their own deeply ingrained aggression that can only strike a blow at each other, not having the innate authority to strike at those who are higher." But time changes everything, she acknowledged, "including our attitude to a place. Irish? In truth I would not want to be anything else. It is a state of mind as well as an actual country."

Her long absence provoked criticism that she was out of touch with the country and the changes which had taken place since the 1960s. O'Brien has conceded that she is unfamiliar with the new urban Ireland but is emphatic that she knows her Ireland: "I know those roads and fields and tractors, every last bit of them. I know them psychically, physically, geographically, spiritually. They have seeped into my creativity." In the 1990s, there was a shift in her writing from the exploration of female experience to a broader social and political canvas. Her depiction of male characters was also altered. Previously "the men in my books were either Heathcliffs or bishops," said O'Brien. "I see now that men are as capable of fear and need and vulnerability as women." In The House of Splendid Isolation (1994), she looks at the troubled politics of Northern Ireland through a protagonist who is an Irish republican terrorist on the run. In Down by the River (1996), she explored the troubling subject of child sex abuse and incest (the book was loosely based on two real-life cases in Ireland).