Edna O'Brien

• Born: December 15, 1930
• Place of Birth: Tuamgraney, County Clare, Ireland
• Died: July 27, 2024

Biography

Josephine Edna O’Brien was a prolific Irish writer in several genres. O’Brien was born on a farm in County Clare, in the western region of Ireland, on December 15, 1930 (some sources say 1932). Her strict Roman Catholic upbringing in a household dominated by a tough, hard-drinking, improvident father and a passive-aggressive, long-suffering mother is central to all of her best work. The backdrop of this “pagan place” and the people in it, to whom she seemed bound even as an adult, is best shown in her Country Girls trilogy and the autobiographical Mother Ireland (1976). From the oppressively close-knit village community of Scarriff, O’Brien first broke away to become a boarder at the Convent of Mercy, Lough Rea, County Galway. From there, she moved to Dublin. In the capital, she met and, in 1954, married the established novelist Ernest Gebler, with whom she had two sons. The marriage was dissolved in 1964 after a bitter custody battle.

O’Brien’s relationship with Gebler was important in getting her started as a writer. They disagreed in print about just what, or how great, his contribution to her early novels was, but the fact remained that in England, to which they had moved, O’Brien began publishing at a furious pace, a pace that she maintained for almost twenty years. The Country Girls (1960) introduced readers to the two female figures who would subsequently represent O’Brien’s concern for love and connection among people in hostile family, religious, and social environments. Cait is the first-person narrator and a sensitive romantic; Baba is her alter ego and a volatile scapegrace. The Lonely Girl (1962) continues their saga two years later. Cait is again the narrator. She describes her involvement with the cultivated snob Eugene Gaillard (whose initials, it has been noted, are those of O’Brien’s former husband) and her subsequent sailing alone to England. Girls in Their Married Bliss (1964) addresses the two women’s problems with the stresses of married life.

This trilogy would present a bleak picture of a woman’s lot in a world of parental, male, and Church repression were it not for O’Brien’s increasingly successful experiments with technique and style; in these, she followed James Joyce, whom she greatly admired. Her saving grace was ironic humor. O’Brien supplied tangible, sensory details and variations in perspective. Her prodigious recall was a feature remarked upon by her critics, including Philip Roth, who wrote a preface to her short-story anthology A Fanatic Heart (1985). Her early trilogy presents in microcosm all the themes of her subsequent work: loneliness, the longing for escape and adventure (often sexual), the repression of the Church, strangling family ties (the brutal father, the martyrlike mother), and the courageous hope with which life must be lived.

Night (1972) is O’Brien’s most Joycean novel. Here, the Cait figure is abandoned, and the Baba figure (Mary) is given full rein. Beginning with the first paragraph, the unconciliatory tone of her monologue is established. “I am a woman,” Mary affirms, and she proceeds to weave together the threads of her (and O’Brien’s) story. An outsider, merely house-sitting in London, she reviews her pilgrimage to “the higher shores of love.” The details are familiar: the vicious father, the ignorant peasantry, the cold husband, the love for children (particularly maternal love for a son).

However, this resolving of the divided self in O’Brien’s work does not continue in an uninterrupted line. I Hardly Knew You (1977) features a predatory female figure in prison for murder and isolated from all productive interaction with society. O’Brien’s search for a resolution of the quest for love is uneasy. After about ten years, during which she wrote no long fiction, she killed off Cait (now Kate) by suicide in the epilogue to The Country Girls Trilogy and Epilogue (1987). In The High Road (1988), however, Kate reappears. In late middle age now, she is as much a hopeless dreamer as ever, looking in all the wrong places and predictably finding all the wrong people, never to become a part of a genuine, lasting, loving relationship.

With the 1990s came more serious novels. In House of Splendid Isolation (1994), O’Brien returned to strictly Irish themes, dealing with Northern Ireland's politics and the Irish Republican Army. An aging and reclusive Irishwoman in the Republic finds herself harboring a terrorist and confronting the issues that have produced such spiraling tragedy. In Down by the River (1996), a young Irish girl is raped by her father and further abused by her society. Wild Decembers (1999) is a romance set in the wild Irish mountains and charged with conflicts between tradition and progress, gossip and truth, vengeance and forgiveness. In the Forest (2002), which takes place in and around a forest in western Ireland, re-creates the circumstances of a multiple murder committed by a tormented young man.

In 2006, O'Brien published The Light of Evening (2006), about a woman on her deathbed seeking a reconciliation with her estranged daughter, a writer. Critical reception was largely positive. Her next novel was The Little Red Chairs (2015), which follows a fictional Balkan war criminal who is now living in a rural Irish village. The book was widely praised and was compared by critics to the works of Joyce and Franz Kafka. Roth called the book O'Brien's masterpiece. O'Brien's publications in the first two decades of the twenty-first century also included a collection of short stories, Saints and Sinners (2011); a memoir, Country Girl (2012); and the novel Girl (2019).

Divided critical reaction toward O’Brien’s work seemed to rise from her own ambivalence about her characters, ambivalence which may have stemmed from her own uncertainties about herself and her past. Some readers find her later work, especially when set outside Ireland, too predictably pessimistic. Given the immature choices of her central characters, such readers have asserted that happy relationships are impossible for women in her fiction. On the other hand, her unsympathetic narrators have been acclaimed by others as perceptive, searing analyses of a genuine, all too familiar, human condition. In the middle, perhaps, are the majority of O’Brien readers who enjoy most her fresh, lively, and detailed depiction of adolescent life in Ireland in the 1950s, when separation from parents and society was neither possible nor desirable. In recognition of her life and work, after having received the title of Saoi of Aosdána, one of Ireland's most prestigious arts distinctions, in 2015, O'Brien was made a Dame of the British Empire in 2018.

Having struggled with illness for some time, O'Brien died at the age of ninety-three on July 27, 2024.

Bibliography

Colletta, Lisa and Maureen O’Connor, editors. Wild Colonial Girl: Essays on Edna O’Brien. U of Wisconsin P, 2006.

Dodd, Luke. "Edna O'Brien Obituary." The Guardian, 29 July 2024, www.theguardian.com/books/2024/jul/29/edna-obrien-obituary. Accessed 4 Sept. 2024.

Doyle, Martin. “Edna O'Brien at 90: 'To Read Her Is to Know Love; of Words, of Literature and of Life Itself.'” The Irish Times, 15 Dec. 2020, www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/edna-o-brien-at-90-to-read-her-is-to-know-love-of-words-of-literature-and-of-life-itself-1.4437381. Accessed 8 July 2024.

Dunn, Nell. “Edna.” In Talking to Women. Macgibbon and Kee, 1965.

Eckley, Grace. Edna O’Brien. Bucknell UP, 1974.

Freyne, Patrick. "Edna O'Brien: 'I Was Lonely, Cut Off from the Dance of Life.'" The Irish Times, 7 Nov. 2015, www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/edna-o-brien-i-was-lonely-cut-off-from-the-dance-of-life-1.2419776. Accessed 21 Mar. 2017.

Gillespie, Michael Patrick. “(S)he Was Too Scrupulous Always.” The Comic Tradition in Irish Women Writers, edited by Theresa O’Connor. UP of Florida, 1996.

Guppy, Shusha. “The Art of Fiction: Edna O’Brien.” The Paris Review, vol. 26, summer 1984, pp. 22-50.

L’Heureux, John. “The Terrorist and the Lady.” The New York Times Book Review, 26 June 1994, p. 7.

Lain, Kathryn, et al., editors. Edna O'Brien: New Critical Perspectives. Carysfort Press, 2006.

O'Brien, Edna. Country Girl: A Memoir. Little, Brown and Company, 2012.

O’Brien, Edna. “Interview.” Paris Review, vol. 26, summer 1984, pp. 22-50.

O’Brien, Edna. “The Pleasure and the Pain.” Interview by Miriam Gross. The Observer, 14 Apr. 1985, pp. 17–18.

O’Brien, Peggy. “The Silly and the Serious: An Assessment of Edna O’Brien.” The Massachusetts Review, vol. 28, autumn 1987, pp. 474–88.

O'Hagan, Sean, and Edna O'Brien. “Edna O'Brien: 'I Want to Go out as Someone Who Spoke the Truth.'” The Guardian, 25 Aug. 2019, www.theguardian.com/books/2019/aug/25/edna-obrien-interview-new-novel-girl-sean-ohagan. Accessed 8 July 2024.

O’Hara, Kiera. “Love Objects: Love and Obsession in the Stories of Edna O’Brien.” Studies in Short Fiction, vol. 30, summer 1993, pp. 317–26.

Parker, Ian. “Edna O'Brien Is Still Writing About Women on the Run.” The New Yorker, 7 Oct. 2019, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/10/14/edna-obrien-is-still-writing-about-women-on-the-run. Accessed 8 July 2024.

Rosenbaum, Ron. "Novelist Edna O’Brien Explores the True Nature of Evil." Smithsonian Magazine, July 2016, www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/novelist-edna-obrien-true-nature-evil-180959499. Accessed 21 Mar. 2017.

Shumaker, Jeanette Roberts. “Sacrificial Women in Short Stories by Mary Lavin and Edna O’Brien.” Studies in Short Fiction, vol. 32, spring 1995, pp. 185–97.

Woodward, Richard B. “Edna O’Brien: Reveling in the Heartbreak.” The New York Times Magazine, 12 Mar. 1989, pp. 42, 50, 52.