Edna O'Brien

Edna O'Brien (born 15 December 1930) is an Irish novelist, memoirist, playwright, poet and short story writer. She is considered the "doyenne" of Irish literature.^[1][2] Philip Roth considers her "the most gifted woman now writing in English",^[3] while former President of Ireland Mary Robinson regards her as "one of the great creative writers of her generation."^[4]

O'Brien's works often revolve around the inner feelings of women, and their problems in relating to men, and to society as a whole.^[5] Her first novel, The Country Girls, is often credited with breaking silence on sexual matters and social issues during a repressive period in Ireland following World War II.^[6] The book was banned, burned and denounced from the pulpit, and O'Brien left Ireland behind.

O'Brien now lives in London. She received the Irish PEN Award in 2001. Saints and Sinners won the 2011 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, the world's richest prize for a short story collection. Faber and Faber published her memoir, Country Girl, in 2012.

Biography

Edna O'Brien was born in 1930 at Tuamgraney, County Clare, Ireland, 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 her family. O'Brien was the youngest child of "a strict, religious family". In the years 1941–46 she was educated by the Sisters of Mercy – a circumstance that 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."^[1] As an adolescent she fell in love with a nun.^[7]

In 1950, she was awarded a licence as a pharmacist. In Ireland, she read such writers as Tolstoy, Thackeray, and F. Scott Fitzgerald.^[5] In 1954, she married, against her parents' wishes, the Irish writer Ernest Gébler and the couple moved to London – "We lived in SW 20. Sub-urb-ia."^[1] They raised two sons, Carlo (a writer) and Sasha, but the marriage was dissolved in 1964. Gébler died in 1998.

In London, she bought Introducing James Joyce by T. S. Eliot and said that when she learned that James 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.'"^[1] In London she started work as a reader for Hutchinson where, on the basis of her reports, she was commissioned, for £50, 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 included The Lonely Girl (1962) and Girls in Their Married Bliss (1964). Shortly after their publication, these books were banned and, in some cases burned, in her native country due to 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 later said.^[1] Her novel, A Pagan Place (1970), was about her repressive childhood. Her parents were vehemently against all things related to literature; her mother strongly disapproved of her daughter's career as a writer. Once when her mother found a Seán O'Casey in her daughter's possession she tried to burn it.^[5]

In 1981, she wrote a play, Virginia, about Virginia Woolf and it 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 staged at The Public Theater in New York in spring 1985. Other notable works include 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 Irish republican Dominic McGlinchey, later shot dead, whom she called "a grave and reflective man"), marked a new phase in her writing career. Down by the River (1996) concerned an under-age 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.^[1]

Legacy

According to Scottish 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." Irish novelist Colum McCann avers that O'Brien has been "the advance scout for the Irish imagination" for over fifty years.^[1]

Awards and honours

O'Brien's awards include a Kingsley Amis Award in 1962 (for The Country Girls), the Yorkshire Post Book Award in 1970 (for A Pagan Place), and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in 1990 for Lantern Slides. In 2006, O'Brien was appointed adjunct professor of English Literature in University College, Dublin.^[8] In 2009, she was honoured with the Bob Hughes Lifetime Achievement Award during a special ceremony at the year's Irish Book Awards in Dublin.^[9] Her collection Saints and Sinners won the 2011 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award,^[10] with judge Thomas McCarthy referring to her as "the Solzhenitsyn of Irish life". RTÉ aired a documentary on her as part of its Arts strand in early 2012.^[11][12]

• 1962: Kingsley Amis Award for The Country Girls
• 1970: Yorkshire Post Book Award (Book of the Year) for A Pagan Place*
• 1990: Los Angeles Times Book Prize (Fiction) for Lantern Slides
• 1991: Premio Grinzane Cavour (Italy) for Girl with Green Eyes
• 1993: Writers' Guild Award (Best Fiction) for Time and Tide
• 1995: European Prize for Literature (European Association for the Arts) for House of Splendid Isolation
• 2001: Irish PEN Award
• 2006: Ulysses Medal (University College Dublin)
• 2009: Bob Hughes Lifetime Achievement Award in Irish Literature
• 2010: Shortlisted for Irish Book of the Decade (Irish Book Awards) for In The Forest
• 2011: Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, Saints and Sinners^[10]
• 2012: Irish Book Awards (Irish Non-Fiction Book), Country Girl^[13]

List of works

Novels

• 1960 – The Country Girls, ISBN 0-14-001851-4
• 1962 – The Lonely Girl, later published as Girl with Green Eyes, ISBN 0-14-002108-6
• 1964 – Girls in Their Married Bliss, ISBN 0-14-002649-5
  • 1987 – The Country Girls Trilogy, collected with new epilogue, ISBN 0-14-010984-6
• 1965 – August Is a Wicked Month, ISBN 0-14-002720-3
• 1966 – Casualties of Peace, ISBN 0-14-002875-7
• 1970 – A Pagan Place, ISBN 0-297-00027-6
• 1971 – Zee & Co., ISBN 0-297-00336-4
• 1972 – Night, ISBN 0-297-99541-3
• 1977 – Johnny I Hardly Knew You, ISBN 0-297-77284-8
• 1988 – The High Road, ISBN 0-297-79493-0
• 1992 – Time and Tide, ISBN 0-670-84552-3
• 1994 – House of Splendid Isolation, ISBN 0-297-81460-5
• 1996 – Down by the River, ISBN 0-297-81806-6
• 1999 – Wild Decembers, ISBN 0-297-64576-5
• 2002 – In the Forest, ISBN 0-297-60732-4
• 2006 – The Light of Evening, ISBN 0-618-71867-2
• 2013 - "Ragazze di campagna", Elliot Edizioni, ISBN 9788861923591

Short story collections

• 1968 – The Love Object and Other Stories, ISBN 0-14-003104-9
• 1974 – A Scandalous Woman and Other Stories, ISBN 0-297-76735-6
• 1978 – Mrs Reinhardt and Other Stories, ISBN 0-297-77476-X
• 1979 – Some Irish Loving, an anthology which includes some translations, ISBN 0-297-77581-2
• 1982 – Returning, ISBN 0-297-78052-2
• 1985 – A Fanatic Heart, ISBN 0-297-78607-5
• 1990 – Lantern Slides, ISBN 0-297-84019-3
• 2011 – Saints and Sinners, ISBN 0316122726

Drama

• A Pagan Place
• Virginia: The Life of Virginia Woolf
• Family Butchers
• Triptych
• 2009 – Haunted

Non-fiction books

• 1976 – Mother Ireland, ISBN 0-297-77110-8
• 1999 – James Joyce, biography, ISBN 0-297-84243-9
• 2009 – Byron in Love, biography, ISBN 978-0-393-07011-8
• 2012 – Country Girl, memoir, ISBN 978-0316122702

Poetry collections

• 1989 – On the Bone, ISBN 0-906887-38-0
• 2009 – "Watching Obama", poem, The Daily Beast^[3]

Further reading

• Colletta, Lisa; O'Connor, Maureen (2006). Wild Colonial Girl: Essays on Edna O'Brien. Univ of Wisconsin Press. ISBN 978-0-299-21633-7. 
• Eckley, Grace. Edna O'Brien (1974)^[5]
• Laing, Kathryn; Mooney, Sinéad; O'Connor, Maureen (2006). Edna O'brien: New Critical Perspectives. Peter Lang. ISBN 978-1-904505-20-4. 
• O'Connor, Theresa (ed). The Comic Tradition in Irish Women Writers (1996)^[5]
• Plimpton, George (ed). Writers at Work (1986)^[5]
• Schrank, Bernice. Edna O'Brien (1999)^[5]
• Serafin, Steven R (ed). Encyclopedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, Vol. 3 (1999)^[5]
• Staley, Thomas F (ed). Twentieth-century Women Novelists (1982)^[5]
• Trevor, William. "Edna O'Brien", in Contemporary Novelists (1976)^[5]

References

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Edna O'Brien

• Edna O'Brien at Clare County Library
• Shusha Guppy (Summer 1984). "Edna O'Brien, The Art of Fiction No. 82". The Paris Review. 
• "Audio Interview with Edna O'Brien" at WiredForBooks, 22 May 1992
• "Lit Chat" at salon.com, 2 December 1995
• "You have to be lonely to be a writer" – Edna O'Brien video interview at The Guardian, 7 December 2012
• Edna O'Brien reads an extract from her autobiography Country Girl – video