Edna O’Brien: From Irish villain to national icon — an appreciation
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It is safe to assume Edna O’Brien would have been gratified by the many tributes that flowed on her death this week, reflecting the high esteem in which she was deservedly held.
It wasn’t always this way, however. It is probably difficult for younger generations to understand from today’s vantage point why one of Ireland’s greatest writers was once vilified in her home country.
Like one of her literary heroes, James Joyce, she had to leave Ireland to give expression to her gift, spending most of her life in London.
As she wrote in an essay for : “I left Ireland willingly, but I doubt that I would have found the freedom to write if I had stayed there, as the obstacles and scrutiny were oppressive.”
O’Brien’s staggering literary achievements were often overshadowed by a narrative driven by various moral agendas related to her sex, though her own relationship to feminism was not always straightforward.
She had a long and prolific career — bookended by , published in 1960, and her last, , published in 2019. Her extraordinary staying power was testament not only to her skill as a writer but to her survival instinct and her confidence in her work.
As she said in an interview with the : “I'm a good fighter. I stay the course. Part of it is to do with being a woman…. I think I am what Napoleon said about Madame de Sevigne. I think like a woman and write like a man. My books are very ferocious, though the language is well wrought."
From a body of work that also contained screenplays, short stories, stage adaptations and biography, she will remain best known for her debut novel and the two books that followed in the trilogy, even though she said if she had to recommend any of her books it would be .
She wrote in the space of a few weeks after arriving in London with her small sons Carlo and Sasha, in November 1958. She described the book as “my experience of Ireland and my farewell to it”. Her rendering of that experience and the themes of — the awakening, sexual and otherwise, of convent girls Kate and Baba — were not welcome in an Ireland still very much under the cosh of Archbishop John Charles McQuaid, who called it a “smear on Irish womanhood”.
The backlash, led by the Church, was swift and vicious, and it was banned by the censor, although the controversy no doubt aided the book’s longevity in the collective memory. (Although O’Brien did say that “if as many people had read that book as claim to have done, then I would be a rich woman indeed”).
She didn’t hold back in her own denunciation of her home place of Tuamgraney, Co Clare, when she described how the book was burned there in an interview with the .
“It was a humble event, as befits a backward place. Two or three people had gone to Limerick and bought . The parish priest asked them to hand in the books, which they did, and he burnt them on the grounds of the church….My mother was very harsh about it; she thought I was a disgrace. That is the sadness — it takes you half a life to get out of the pits of darkness and stupidity. It fills me with anger, and with pity.”
A decade into their marriage, O’Brien left her husband Ernest Gébler. In an interview with the BBC's Michael Parkinson, she said: “My writing was very instrumental in the ending of my marriage. If you were to ask me would I undo that, the answer is no because I believe, and my children have proved it to me, that you can be a woman and a writer and it need not damage the family life.
"But there is that thing of jealousy which we can’t ignore… I haven’t had a husband since… because my actual work is a bit of a threat to men.”
Although she rejected the perception of herself as a literary celebrity courted not only for her talent but her beauty, O’Brien counted many rich and famous men — from JD Salinger to Sean Connery and Richard Burton — as friends, and was even at one point a patient of the controversial psychiatrist RD Laing, who convinced her to take LSD, an experience she described as “terrifying”.
She also exerted influence in other spheres, discussing the Irish political situation with former British prime ministers Tony Blair and Gordon Brown at Downing Street.
In later years, as the grip of the Church loosened and attitudes became more liberal, O’Brien’s work and her influence began to be celebrated, even though her books still generated controversy. Her novel , about a woman held hostage by an IRA gunman, took inspiration from the life of the late former INLA leader Dominic McGlinchey, and eyebrows were raised when O'Brien interviewed him in Portlaoise Prison.
Her 2002 book , based on the horrific murders of Imelda Riney, her three-year-old son Liam, and a priest, Fr Joseph Walsh by Brendan O’Donnell, was seen by some as a step too far. She saw much of the criticism as misogynistic, telling : “Of course, it would have been all right if it was a man who'd written that novel, if I had been Sebastian Barry, or Roddy Doyle, or John Banville. There are still certain no-go areas for women writers. I'm always surprised to incur such wrath.”
However, when in 2019, the ran an oddly provocative profile of O’Brien herself, the Irish literary establishment rowed in to defend her.
As she moved from villain to icon in her native country, the recognition was welcomed. When she won the prestigious Frank O’Connor Short Story Award in 2011 for her collection , the first Irish writer to do so, she accepted the award in person at the Metropole Hotel in Cork, saying: “I haven’t won that many prizes in the past, so I have no qualms about accepting one on this occasion.”
She also cited Cork writer O’Connor as one of her literary heroes and he no doubt would have approved of her typically shrewd description of the short story form in an interview with the in 2008: “I love the medium of the short story, but my early works were all novels. The short stories came later. They’re very different forms; I think of the short story as something swift, like a bullet, and the novel as being like a tank.”
As the author Colum McCann told the in 2019: “Edna blazed a path for many of us. She was the advance scout for so much that happened in the Irish imagination. In this sense she sometimes bore the brunt of breaking down frontiers. Things were so much easier for younger writers because they had been quite difficult for Edna.”
O’Brien forged her own path with what often appeared to be an indomitable fearlessness. But this combined with vulnerability, and in one respect at least, she was endearingly human.
She once told a journalist who interviewed her: “Just say I was born in the mid-30s... If I die and you write my obituary, don't give my age.”
Happy to grant your wish, Edna.