| Edna O'Brien | |
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| Born | 15 December 1930 Tuamgraney, County Clare, Ireland |
| Occupation | Novelist |
| Notable work(s) | The Country Girls |
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Edna O'Brien (born 15 December 1930) is an Irish novelist and short story writer whose works often revolve around the inner feelings of women, and their problems in relating to men and to society as a whole.[1]
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Edna O'Brien was born in Tuamgraney, County Clare, Ireland, in 1930, a place she would later describe as "fervid" and "enclosed." 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 in Brooklyn, New York, for a well-off Irish-American family before returning to Ireland to raise a family. O'Brien was the only child of 'a strict, religious family.' In the years 1941-46 she was educated by the Sisters of Mercy - a circumstance which contributed to a 'suffocating' childhood. "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."[2]
In 1950, she was awarded a licence as pharmacist. She married, against her parents' wishes, in the summer of 1954, the Czech/Irish writer Ernest Gébler and the couple moved to London - "We lived in SW 20. Sub-urb-ia."[2] They raised two sons, Carlos and Sasha, but the marriage was dissolved in 1964. Gébler died in 1998. In Ireland she read such writers as Tolstoy, Thackeray, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. In London, O'Brien bought Introducing James Joyce by T.S. Eliot and has said that, when she learnt Joyce's A 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."'[2] In London she started work as a reader for Hutchinson where, on the basis of her reports, she was commissioned, for £25, to write a novel.
She published her first book, The Country Girls, in 1960. This was the first part of a trilogy of novels (later collected as The Country Girls Trilogy) which also included The Lonely Girl (1962) and Girls in Their Married Bliss (1964). Shortly after their publication, these books were banned and, in some cases burnt, in Ireland, because of their frank portrayals of the sex lives of their characters. In the 1960s, she was a patient of R 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.
Her novel A Pagan Place (1970) was about her childhood in a repressive Irish town. Indeed, her parents were vehemently against all things related to literature; her mother strongly disapproved of Edna's career as an author, which greatly troubled Edna. In 1981, she wrote a play, Virginia, about Virginia Woolf and was staged originally in Canada and subsequently in the West End of London at the Theatre Royal Haymarket with Maggie Smith and directed by Robin Phillips. It was subsequently staged at The Public Theater in New York in the spring of 1985. Other notable biographical works included a biography of James Joyce, published in 1999, and one of the poet Lord Byron, Byron in Love, 2009.
House of Splendid Isolation (1994), her novel about a terrorist who goes on the run, (part of her research involved visiting Dominic McGlinchey, whom she called 'a grave and reflective man'), marked a new phase in her writing career, "when she turned away from women, and from love, and began writing state-of-the-nation novels." [2] Down by the River (1996) concerned an under-age rape victim who sought an abortion in England, the "Miss X case", and In the Forest (2002) the case of Brendan O'Donnell, a disturbed young man who abducted and murdered a woman, her three-year-old son, and a priest.[2]
She has received numerous awards for her works, including a Kingsley Amis Award in 1962 (for The Country Girls), the Yorkhire Post Book Award in 1970 (for A Pagan Place), and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in 1990 for Lantern Slides. In 2006, Edna O' Brien was appointed adjunct professor of English Literature in University College, Dublin.[3] In 2009, Edna O’Brien was honoured with a special lifetime achievement award - the Bob Hughes Lifetime Achievement Award - at a special ceremony for the year’s Irish Book Awards in Dublin.[4] According to the novelist Andrew O'Hagan, her 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." And in the words of the novelist Colum McCann she has been "the advance scout for the Irish imagination" for over fifty years.[5]
She is one of two surviving panel members of the first edition of the BBC programme Question Time, the other being Teddy Taylor.
She won the 2011 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award with her collection Saints and Sinners[6], with judge Thomas McCarthy referring to her as "the Solzhenitsyn of Irish life".