In praise of Edna O’Brien, the woman who changed the Irish book world

When I was an impressionable girl in my early teens, I read a wonderful novel that has haunted me ever since. Cait and Baba were older than me, convent schoolgirls who grew up in Catholic Ireland, and I was English-Australian and an agnostic, but I identified with them all the same. Especially Cait, the dreamy girl with romantic ideals and yearnings. Baba was a bit more worldly. And both of them were on their way to the big bad city to experience life.

Their story is told in Edna O’Brien’s 1960 novel, The Country Girls, and in the two novels that followed, The Lonely Girls and Girls in Their Married Bliss. Together they make up what is called the Country Girls Trilogy. I eagerly devoured all three books, and looking back now, I can’t remember precisely what happened in which book. But what I do remember is my sense of awe at what was for the time pretty explicit erotic detail, and also a profound sadness. Because, of course, there were men who exploited that girlish hope and naivety.

Since O’Brien’s recent death at the age of 93, there has been a well-deserved outpouring of praise for a great novelist who paved the way for today’s Irish writers, particularly women. She inspired writers as diverse as Anne Enright, Claire Keegan and Sally Rooney – and a few males too, notably Colm Toibin. But what shocked me most about these comments was that they also revealed how much O’Brien was hated when her novels were first published.

I knew The Country Girls was considered a bit raunchy and controversial, which was one of the reasons I wanted to read it. But at the time I had no idea what reaction the book had provoked in Ireland. The moment it was published, it was banned. Priests denounced it and it was burned in public in several places, including O’Brien’s home town. The Minister for Justice declared “the book was filth and should not be allowed inside any decent home”. Even O’Brien’s mother, who disapproved of literature, was deeply ashamed of her.

Outside Ireland, however, the book became a bestseller and launched O’Brien’s long, prolific and much-awarded career. Apart from the trilogy, she wrote many novels, short stories, plays, a memoir, biographies, poetry and children’s books.

Her last novel, Girl, published in 2019, when she was in her 80s, seemed like a new direction, based as it was on true stories of the abduction of Nigerian girls. But in an interview with The Guardian, O’Brien maintained the book was still part of her life’s work: “to chart and get inside the mind, soul, heart and emotion of girls in some form of restriction … but who come through their experiences and live to tell the tale. It is a theme I have lived and often cried with.”

To go back to the early days, I’m moved by another Guardian interview O’Brien did in 1962, when she was living in London with her then husband, Ernest Gebler, and their two sons. She began to write The Country Girls there: “London was strange to me. I hate strangeness. It sort of frightens me … I didn’t realise I would miss Ireland so much.” Her writing was “about things I’ve done myself, or wish I’ve done myself, or imagine I’ve done myself”. And she could never have written anything in Ireland: “If you write with honesty, they pounce on you.”

They don’t pounce so readily these days, which has opened the door for so many other brilliant Irish writers. And that’s certainly in large part due to O’Brien’s courage and candour.
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