Edna O'Brien | |
|---|---|
.jpg) O'Brien at theHay Festival in 2016 | |
| Born | Josephine Edna O'Brien (1930-12-15)15 December 1930 Tuamgraney, County Clare, Ireland |
| Died | 27 July 2024(2024-07-27) (aged 93) London, England |
| Resting place | Inis Cealtra, County Clare |
| Occupation |
|
| Language | English |
| Period | 1960–2019 |
| Notable works | |
| Notable awards | |
| Spouse | |
| Children | 2, includingCarlo Gébler |
Josephine Edna O'BrienDBE (15 December 1930 – 27 July 2024) was an Irish novelist, memoirist, playwright, poet and short-story writer.
O'Brien's works often revolve around the inner feelings of women and their problems relating to men and society as a whole. Her first novel,The Country Girls (1960), has been credited with breaking silence on sexual matters and social issues during a repressive period in Ireland after theSecond World War. The book was banned and denounced from thepulpit. Many of her novels were translated into French. Her memoir,Country Girl, was published in 2012, and her last novel,Girl, was published in 2019. Many of her novels were based in Ireland, butGirl was a fictional account of a victim of the 2014Chibok kidnapping in Nigeria.
In 2015, she was elected toAosdána by her fellow artists and honoured with the titleSaoi. She was the recipient of many other awards and honours, winning theIrish PEN Award in 2001 and thebiennialDavid Cohen Prize in 2019. France made her aCommandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2021. Her short story collectionSaints and Sinners won the 2011Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, the world's richest prize for that genre.
Josephine Edna O'Brien was born on 15 December 1930[1] to farmer[2] Michael O'Brien and Lena Cleary, atTuamgraney in County Clare, Ireland, a place she would later describe as "fervid" and "enclosed". She was the youngest child of "a strict, religious family". They lived at "Drewsborough" (also "Drewsboro"), a "large two-storey house", which her mother kept in "semi-grandeur".[3] Michael O'Brien, "whose family had seen wealthier times" as landowners,[4] had inherited a "thousand acres or more" and "a fortune from rich uncles", but was a "profligate" hard-drinker who gambled away his inheritance, the land "sold off in bits ... or bartered to pay debts".[5] Her mother, Lena, "came from a poorer background".[6] According to O'Brien, her mother was a strong, controlling woman, who had emigrated temporarily to America and worked for some time as a maid inBrooklyn, New York, for a well-off Irish-American family, before returning to Ireland to raise her family.[7]
From 1941 to 1946, O'Brien was educated atSt. Raphael's College, a boarding school run by theSisters of Mercy[7] inLoughrea, County Galway,[8] a circumstance that contributed to a "suffocating" childhood. She recalled: "I rebelled against the coercive and stifling religion into which I was born and bred. It was very frightening and all-pervasive. I'm glad it has gone."[9] Because she deeply missed her mother, she became fond of a nun and tried to identify the nun with herself.[10]
In 1950, having studied at night at a pharmaceutical college and worked in aDublin pharmacy during the day,[11] O'Brien was awarded a licence as apharmacist.[12]
In Ireland, O'Brien read such writers asTolstoy,Thackeray, andF. Scott Fitzgerald.[12] In Dublin, she boughtIntroducing James Joyce, with an introduction written byT. S. Eliot, and said later that when she learned thatJames Joyce'sA Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was autobiographical, it made her realise where she might turn, should she want to write herself. "Unhappy houses are a very good incubation for stories," she said.[9]
In London, she started work as a reader forHutchinson, where, based on her reports, she was commissioned for £50 to write a novel. She published her first book,The Country Girls, in 1960.[13] It was the first part of a trilogy of novels (later collected asThe Country Girls Trilogy), which includedThe Lonely Girl (1962) andGirls in Their Married Bliss (1964). Shortly after their publication, the books were placed on the censorship index and banned in her native country because of their frank portrayals of the sex lives of their characters. O'Brien herself was accused of "corrupting the minds of young women". She later said, "I felt no fame. I was married. I had young children. All I could hear out of Ireland from my mother and anonymous letters was bile and odium and outrage".[14] The book was also denounced from thepulpit.[15] It had been claimed that copies ofThe Country Girls were burned when it was published, but according to a letter to The Times fromMary Kenny in 2024, an investigation in 2015 found no witnesses or evidence and it was concluded that the story was probably not true.[16]
Many of her novels were not well received in Ireland. Her fourth novel,August Is a Wicked Month (1965), in which an unhappily married woman has a "sensual awakening on theFrench Riviera", was excoriated in the press and banned in Ireland.In The Forest (2002), a fictional account of a notorious Irish murder, was described byIrish Times criticFintan O'Toole as "morally criminal".[17]
In the 1960s, O'Brien was a patient of Scottish psychiatristR. D. Laing: "I thought he might be able to help me. He couldn't do that – he was too mad himself – but he opened doors", she said later.[9] Her novel,A Pagan Place (1970), was about her repressive childhood. Her parents were vehemently against all things related to literature and her mother strongly disapproved of her daughter's career as a writer. Once, when her mother found aSeán O'Casey book in her daughter's possession, she tried to burn it.[12]
AlongsideTeddy Taylor (Conservative),Michael Foot (Labour) andDerek Worlock (CatholicArchbishop of Liverpool), O'Brien was a panel member for the first edition of the BBC'sQuestion Time in 1979, and was awarded the first answer in the programme's history ("Edna O'Brien, you were born there", referring to Ireland).[18] Taylor's death in 2017 left her the sole surviving member. In 1980, she wrote a play,Virginia, aboutVirginia Woolf, which was first staged in June 1980 at theStratford Festival, Ontario, Canada. It was subsequently performed in theWest End of London, at theTheatre Royal Haymarket, starringMaggie Smith, and directed byRobin Phillips.[19] The play was staged atThe Public Theater in New York in 1985. Also in 1980, O'Brien appeared alongsidePatrick McGoohan in the TV movieThe Hard Way.[9]
Other works by O'Brien included a biography ofJames Joyce, published in 1999, and a biography of the poetLord Byron,Byron in Love, in 2009.House of Splendid Isolation (1994), her novel about a terrorist who goes on the run, marked a new phase in her writing career. Part of her research involved visiting Irish republicanDominic McGlinchey, later shot dead, whom she called "a grave and reflective man", and "most reflective and at the same time most forthcoming".[20] She told Marianne Heron, of theIrish Independent, that she had told McGlinchey "that she liked everything about him except what he was [and] he told her that his mother said the same thing".[20] O'Brien denied having an affair with McGlinchey, and claimed later that, as a result of her research, she had to refute questions as to whether she "had love affairs with republicans".[21]
Down by the River (1996) concerned an underage rape victim who sought an abortion in England, the "Miss X case".In the Forest (2002) dealt with the real-life case of Brendan O'Donnell, who abducted and murdered a woman, her three-year-old son, and a priest, in rural Ireland.[9]
O'Brien's last novel,Girl (2019), was based on theabduction of 276 schoolgirls in Nigeria in 2014. She travelled to that country twice to do research, which included interviewing numerous people, from "escaped girls, their mothers and sisters, to trauma specialists, doctors andUnicef". She later said that she had tried to create a "kind of mythic story from all this pain and horror", and was disappointed by its poor reception in the US, although it was well-received in France and Germany.[17] In 2020, she opened theAvignon theatre festival with a reading from the book.[22] PoetImtiaz Dharker, judge for the 2019David Cohen Prize, said aboutGirl: "I thought I had the course of O'Brien's work mapped out before the judging came around, and then, towards the end of the process, another great tome dropped through the letterbox, changing the whole terrain". O'Brien regardedGirl as a continuation of the focus of her career, "to chart and get inside the mind, soul, heart and emotion of girls in some form of restriction, some form of life that isn't easy, but who find a way to literally plough their way through and come out as winners of sort – maybe not getting prizes – but come through their experiences and live to tell the tale. It is a theme I have lived and often cried with".[23]
Her work includes references toIrish lore and history and mentions of distinctive geographic features such asDruids' circles,Inis Cealtra, andLough Derg, County Donegal.[24]
Many of her works were translated into French, withThe Country Girls translation published in 1960 byÉditions Julliard and in 1962 byPresses de la Cité. Later titles were published byGallimard and then byFayard. In 2010, O'Brien formed an exclusive relationship with publisherSabine Wespieser.[22] Her work was much loved in France, "both for the quality of her writing but also for her universal struggles which received a particular resonance in France" (French Embassy in London).[25] After the publication ofGirl in 2019, she featured in a number of French publications, includingTélérama,Elle,Le Monde des Livres, andLe Journal du Dimanche.[26]
Emory University inAtlanta, Georgia, US, holds her papers from 1939 to 2000. More recent papers are held atUniversity College Dublin.[27][28] In September 2021, it was announced that O'Brien would be donating her archive to theNational Library of Ireland. The library was to hold papers from O'Brien covering the period of 2000 to 2021,[29] including correspondence, drafts, notes and revisions.[28]
In 1954, O'Brien met and married, against her parents' wishes, the Irish writerErnest Gébler, and the couple moved toLondon in 1959, where, as she later put it, "We lived inSW 20. Sub-urb-ia".[9] They had two sons, Sasha,[17] an architect who lives in London,[30] and writerCarlo Gébler, but the marriage ended in 1964. Initially believing he deserved credit for helping her become an accomplished writer, Ernest came to believe he was the author of O'Brien's books[citation needed]. In 2009, Carlo revealed that his parents' marriage had been volatile, with bitter rows between his mother and father over her success.[31] Ernest Gébler died in 1998.[32]
O'Brien remained in London until her death, although she often visited Ireland.[24] In 2020, at the age of 90, she was renting a flat inChelsea.[17]
The reaction toThe Country Girls in Ireland damaged her relationship with her mother, who was ashamed of her daughter.[17] (Her mother died in 1977.[24]) The press often portrayed O'Brien as a "party girl", with American magazineVanity Fair calling her "the playgirl of the western world". She socialised with glamorous men such asMarlon Brando andRobert Mitchum, but said later that she was "doing the cooking" at most of the parties.[17]
Edna O'Brien died following a long illness in London, England, on 27 July 2024, at the age of 93.[33][34][35] She is buried onInis Cealtra (Holy Island), an island inLough Derg.[36]
According to Scottish novelistAndrew O'Hagan, O'Brien's place in Irish letters is assured: "She changed the nature of Irish fiction; she brought the woman's experience and sex and internal lives of those people on to the page, and she did it with style, and she made those concerns international." Irish novelistColum McCann avers that O'Brien has been "the advance scout for the Irish imagination" for over fifty years.[9]
Irish presidentMichael D. Higgins, also a writer and poet, wrote: "Through that deeply insightful work, rich in humanity, Edna O'Brien was one of the first writers to provide a true voice to the experiences of women in Ireland in their different generations and played an important role in transforming the status of women across Irish society".[37][34]
A documentary filmBlue Road - The Edna O'Brien Story, bySinéad O'Shea, premiered at the2024 Toronto International Film Festival, and was released in Irish cinemas in January 2025. The documentary is based on her journals (narrated byJessie Buckley), and includes interviews with O'Brien and others.[38][39]
Philip Roth once described her as "the most gifted woman now writing in English".[40] A former president of Ireland,Mary Robinson, cited her as "one of the great creative writers of her generation".[41] Others who hailed her as one of the greatest writers of her time includedJohn Banville,Michael Ondaatje andIan McKellen.[23]
O'Brien's awards include theYorkshire Post Book Award in 1970 (forA Pagan Place), and theLos Angeles Times Book Prize in 1990 forLantern Slides. In 2006, she was appointed adjunct professor of English Literature inUniversity College Dublin.[42]
In 2009, O'Brien was honoured with the Bob Hughes Lifetime Achievement Award during a special ceremony at the year's Irish Book Awards in Dublin.[43] Her collectionSaints and Sinners won the 2011Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award,[44][22] with judgeThomas McCarthy referring to her as "theSolzhenitsyn of Irish life".RTÉ aired a documentary on her as part of its Arts strand in early 2012.[45][46]
In2017, for her contributions to literature, she was appointed an honoraryDame Commander of the Order of the British Empire.[47]
She was presented with theTorc of theSaoi ofAosdána in 2015 by Irish PresidentMichael D. Higgins. In 2024, Higgins remembered her "election as Saoi, chosen by her fellow artists, was the ultimate expression of the esteem in which her work is held". He also presented her with the Presidential Distinguished Service Award in 2018.[48]
In 2019, O'Brien was awarded theDavid Cohen Prize for Literature at a ceremony in London. The £40,000 prize, awarded every two years in recognition of a living writer's lifetime achievement in literature, has been described as the "UK and Ireland Nobel in literature". JudgeDavid Park said "In winning the David Cohen Prize, Edna O'Brien adds her name to a literary roll call of honour".[49]
Girl (2019) was nominated for two awards in France: thePrix Médicis and thePrix Femina étranger.[26]
In March 2021, France announced that it would be naming O'Brien aCommandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, the country's highest honour for the arts.[50][22]
Other honours and awards include:
| Title | Publication | Collected in |
|---|---|---|
| "Orphan on the Run" | The Saturday Evening Post (6 August 1955) | - |
| "Summer Encounter" | The Saturday Evening Post (21 December 1957) | - |
| "Irish Revel" aka "Come Into the Drawing Room, Doris" | The New Yorker (6 October 1962) | The Love Object |
| "The Small Town Lovers" aka "The Lovers" | The New Yorker (16 February 1963) | Mrs. Reinhardt |
| "The Rug" | The New Yorker (16 March 1963) | The Love Object |
| "Sister Imelda" | Winter's Tales 9 (1963) The New Yorker (9 November 1981) | Returning |
| "An Outing" aka "Lovely to Look At, Delightful to Hold" | The New Yorker (28 March 1964) | The Love Object |
| "Cords" aka "Which of Those Two Ladies Is He Married To?" | The New Yorker (25 April 1964) | |
| "My First Love" | Ladies' Home Journal (June 1965) | - |
| "How to Grow a Wisteria" aka "Let the Rest of the World Go By" | Ladies' Home Journal (July 1965) | The Love Object |
| "A Woman by the Seaside" aka "A Woman at the Seaside" | Nova (August 1965) | Mrs. Reinhardt |
| "The Love Object" | The New Yorker (13 May 1967) | The Love Object |
| "The Mouth of the Cave" | The Love Object (July 1968) | |
| "Paradise" | ||
| "Brothers and Sisters" | Transatlantic Review 30 (Autumn 1968) | - |
| "Ma" | The New Yorker (22 July 1972) | fromNight |
| "Over" | The New Yorker (2 December 1972) | A Scandalous Woman |
| "The Creature" | The New Yorker (30 July 1973) | |
| "Love-Child" | The New Yorker (29 October 1973) | |
| "Honeymoon" | Cosmopolitan (December 1973) | |
| "A Journey" | The New Yorker (11 February 1974) | |
| "The Favourite" | The New Yorker (11 March 1974) | |
| "The House of My Dreams" | The New Yorker (12 August 1974) | |
| "A Scandalous Woman" | A Scandalous Woman (1974) | |
| "Sisters" | ||
| "Forgetting" aka "The Jewel" | Viva (April 1975) | Mrs. Reinhardt |
| "Baby Blue" | The New Yorker (9 June 1975) | |
| "The Classroom" | The New Yorker (21 July 1975) | - |
| "Ways" | The New Yorker (9 February 1976) | Mrs. Reinhardt |
| "Number Ten" | The New Yorker (16 August 1976) | |
| "In the Hours of Darkness" | The New Yorker (13 September 1976) | |
| "Christmas Roses" | The Atlantic (December 1977) | |
| "A Rose in the Heart of New York" aka "A Rose in the Heart" | The New Yorker (1 May 1978) | |
| "Mary" | Punch (1978) | |
| "Clara" | Mrs. Reinhardt (May 1978) | |
| "Mrs. Reinhardt" | ||
| "Starting" | The New Yorker (4 September 1978) | A Rose in the Heart |
| "Green Georgette" | The New Yorker (23 October 1978) | Saints and Sinners |
| "My Mother's Mother" aka "Far Away in Australia" aka "Kin" | The New Yorker (25 December 1978) | Returning |
| "Ghosts" | The New Yorker (9 April 1979) | |
| "Violets" | The New Yorker (5 November 1979) | A Fanatic Heart |
| "The Doll" | Redbook (December 1979) | Returning |
| "The Call" | The New Yorker (3 December 1979) | A Fanatic Heart |
| "The Plan" | The New Yorker (25 February 1980) | |
| "The Return" | The New Yorker (2 February 1981) | |
| "The Connor Girls" aka "The Conner Girls" | The New Yorker (9 March 1981) | Returning |
| "Savages" | The New Yorker (18 January 1982) | |
| "The Bachelor" | The New Yorker (8 March 1982) | |
| "Tough Men" | Returning (1982) | |
| "Courtship" | ||
| "Storm" aka "A Long Way from Home" | Redbook (May 1985) | Lantern Slides |
| "Epitaph" | The New Yorker (27 April 1987) | |
| "A Little Holiday" | The New Yorker (27 July 1987) | |
| "Another Time" | The New Yorker (14 November 1988) | |
| "The Widow" | The New Yorker (23 January 1989) | |
| "Dramas" | The Paris Review 110 (Spring 1989) | |
| "A Demon" aka "A Day Out" | The New Yorker (24 April 1989) | |
| "What a Sky" | The New Yorker (10 July 1989) | |
| "Lantern Sldes" | The New Yorker (1 January 1990) | |
| "Brother" | Antaeus 64/65 (Spring-Autumn 1990) | |
| "Long Distance" | Harper's (June 1990) | |
| "Oft in the Stilly Night" | Lantern Slides (1990) | |
| "No Place" | The New Yorker (17 June 1991) | fromTime and Tide |
| "The Cut" | The New Yorker (4 November 1991) | |
| "Wilderness" | The New Yorker (16 March 1992) | |
| "A Bed of Roses" | The Spectator (18-25 December 1993) | - |
| "Sinners" aka "Sin" | The New Yorker (11 July 1994) | Saints and Sinners |
| "Manhattan Medley" aka "Love's Lesson | Zoetrope: All-Story (Summer 1998) | |
| "My Two Mothers" aka "Forbidden" | The New Yorker (20 March 2000) | |
| "A Boy in the Forest" | The New Yorker (4 February 2002) | fromIn the Forest |
| "Send My Roots Rain" | The Times (10 May 2009) | Saints and Sinners |
| "Old Wounds" | The New Yorker (8-15 June 2009) | |
| "Shovel Kings" | The Atlantic &Kindle (December 2009) | |
| "Inner Cowboy" | Subtropics 11/12 (Winter-Spring 2011) | |
| "Black Flower" | The Times (30 January 2011) | |
| "Madame Cassandra" | Saints and Sinners (May 2011) | |
| "Plunder" |
There will also be a number of major Arts commissions throughout Spring including profiles of Edna O'Brien and Finbar Furey and "Ballymun Lullaby", the award-winning musical documentary that follows music teacher Ron Cooney on a journey of creating a collection of music that aims to bring the community of Ballymun together.
