My encounter with Edna O’Brien, the great literary crusader and giant of Irish literature

By the time I read Edna O’Brien’s debut novel The Country Girls for the first time, I was in my early twenties and it was no longer so shocking. When it was published in 1960, it was banned in Ireland, but not before a priest in Limerick had burned copies after the rosary. The English novelist LP Hartley deemed its protagonists, the teenage Cait and Baba, a pair of “nymphomaniacs”.

Forty years on, Sex and the City was on TV, so a novel depicting the chaste lives of a couple of schoolgirls wasn’t particularly scandalous. Still, though, The Country Girls – a story of two girls striving to move beyond their small town and avoid the fate of their mothers – affected me deeply. O’Brien captured the particular vicious hypocrisies we Irish women endured – when I read the book, abortion was still illegal in Ireland, and divorce had only been legalised a few years previously – but it was more than that. Here was a novel that told the truth about female friendship and teenage girls: about our gruesome envy; our wild and weird lust. O’Brien understood longing better than most writers: the longing for experience; for escape; for sex and love that was “forbidden” – in a 1964 interview, she said that lesbian desire seems to be “part of every woman’s experience”. All of this, written in the face of opposition, took profound courage.

The novelist, who has died aged 93, was a huge figure, stylistically brilliant and forever ambitious, whether she was writing about motherhood (1964’s Girls in Their Married Bliss, a sequel to The Country Girls), war criminals (2015’s The Little Red Chairs), or the fate of schoolgirls kidnapped by Boko Haram (2019’s Girl). She was prolific, producing movie scripts and plays as well as novels, short stories and poetry, in a career that spanned six decades. A siren voice for Ireland who broke barriers, O’Brien sustained her status as a thrilling, boundary-pushing writer throughout her long career. In a sign of her enduring significance, the National Library of Ireland bought all of her papers in 2021 so that her archive could be preserved; it holds 50 boxes of letters, notes and drafts.

I quickly became a devoted reader, gobbling up the two (equally good) sequels to The Country Girls. I read old interviews with O’Brien on the internet, and later, when I was working at a magazine, I finally got to meet her when I interviewed her about a theatre production of The Country Girls in 2012, staged at the Gaiety Theatre in Dublin. Encountering her in a dilapidated rehearsal room on a side street in Dublin was a trip: here was a genius amid the half-finished cups of tea and rolled-up scripts.

That same year, fans of O’Brien devoured a memoir that featured sublime prose as well as gossipy tidbits about life during the “Swinging Sixties”. In Country Girl, O’Brien laid it all out. She was born in rural Co Clare in 1930. Her father was an alcoholic and terrible with money: financial ruin, and the disgrace that would accompany it, loomed throughout her childhood. She saw writing as a vocation and wrote stories from the age of eight or nine: “I would go out to the fields to write. The words ran away with me,” she recalled.

When the time came for her to leave home, she escaped to Dublin, and became an apprentice chemist at a pharmacy while simultaneously looking for opportunities to write. She got a gig writing a weekly column, or “nonsensical jottings” as she later called them, for the railway company magazine under a pen name (“Sabiola” after an Egyptian concubine). Slowly she began to infiltrate the overwhelmingly male literary scene in Dublin. She met her future husband, the Czech-Irish writer Ernest Gébler, during this time. He was, she said, “handsome beyond words”. He was also older and divorced: divorce would not be legal in Ireland for another 35 years or so, and their relationship was violently opposed by her family.

They married, and emigrated to the “bleak suburbia” of southwest London with their two young sons. There, living in a sort of dreary exile with a husband who turned out to be cruel and controlling, O’Brien wrote The Country Girls in a three-week-long haze of inspiration. It changed her life. At 30, she was a literary star, with the financial means to leave her husband and gain custody of her children (even if it would be a long and painful process).

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O’Brien became a gregarious host, with Paul McCartney, Marianne Faithfull, Jane Fonda and many more calling by or attending her parties. She remained a devoted mother to her sons, and continued to work, creating novels, screenplays and stage plays.

Sinead O’Shea, director of the forthcoming documentary Blue Road: The Edna O’Brien Story, spent the last year working with her, as they met for hours of interviews.

“Edna was very funny,” O’Shea says. “Gossipy, bitchy and so sharp, but most of all, she was a workaholic. That was the main thing I learnt about her. She worked and worked and worked. There had been a time, she said, when she could write all day and throw a party that same evening, but this was long in the past.”

In 2022, at the age of 91, she was still working, as the Abbey Theatre in Dublin staged her final play, Joyce’s Women, a show about the various women in the great Irish novelist James Joyce’s life. Ali White, who played Joyce’s patron Harriet Shaw Weaver, tells me that “despite her physical frailty, her energy could blaze for a whole three-hour session and she was always bewildered when the stage manager called for a tea break halfway through”.

She was casual about the impressive literary circles that she had always been at home in. “One afternoon, I noticed her rummaging in her handbag,” White recalls. “A moment later, she held up a string of rosary beads. ‘What are these?’ she asked. ‘They’re rosary beads, Edna,’ I replied. She fixed her gaze on me. I clearly wasn’t quite there. ‘These are TS Eliot’s rosary beads,’ she replied.”

Anyone who met O’Brien knows what that gaze felt like. She was beautiful, imperious, utterly precise; terrifying, to be honest. I’ll never forget the dread I experienced when a mix-up about whether a photographer would be present at our interview meant that I incurred her wrath.

I had so wanted to impress her, but the interview got off to a dreadful start: although I had quickly dispatched the photographer, she was still furious with me for even seeming to suggest that she have a photograph taken when she wasn’t made up and her hair wasn’t done. But then, 10 minutes in, as we discussed Cait and Baba in detail, that pair of characters she had invented decades ago, she softened. “Lynn, I like you,” she said, and I melted.

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The Irish artist Domino Whisker recalls meeting O’Brien at a 2022 lunch thrown by her uncle, the property investor and hotelier Paddy McKillen. McKillen – who owns Château La Coste, a hotel and vineyard that is home to sculptures by some of the world’s most celebrated artists, including Damien Hirst and Louise Bourgeois – was celebrating the fact that he had been awarded L’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government for his contribution to the country’s culture.

O’Brien had received the award the year before, when Covid lockdowns were still in place and she had been obliged, she told people, to “drink to herself, alone”. And so at this lunch at Château La Coste, sitting beside Bono and the artist Sean Scully, she had an opportunity to savour her success by celebrating a fellow Irish person who had received the honour. It was, says Whisker, “truly beautiful”.

O’Brien congratulated McKillen, and his sister Mara, on the project of Château La Coste, and for bringing a bit of Ireland to Provence, but she “wished to God, they would bring some Provence to Ireland”.

It’s a throwaway mark that spoke of her complicated relationship with Ireland. “Her relationship with home [was] so fraught,” says Whisker, “and yet she managed to still have a terrible love and ache for home.”

It’s a feeling many of us have about home, wherever home might be, and it was there in the very first book she wrote.

All her books deserve to be read: Philip Roth considered The Little Red Chairs her masterpiece, and I love her heartbreaking 1962 short story Come Into the Drawing Room, Doris. But if you are new to Edna O’Brien, start with The Country Girls. Try to pretend you know nothing about it.