Edna O’Brien, one of the most influential and widely read Irish writers of her generation, has died “after a long illness,” according to her publisher Faber. She was 93. O'Brien was best known for challenging literary taboos, especially with her candid depictions of the lives of Irish women in full revolt against the oppression of Ireland’s traditional values, especially those of the Catholic Church.
Her writing career began with the publication, in 1960, of The Country Girls, a novel about the sexual awakening of two young women who moved from County Clare in rural Ireland to Dublin—much like O’Brien had done herself. The Country Girls was banned by the Irish state censor, and the parish priest in O’Brien’s hometown of Tuamgraney is reputed to have burned the book. It became an international bestseller.
Prior to beginning her career as an author, O’Brien, who was professionally trained as a pharmacist, married Czech-Irish writer Ernest Gébler, with whom she had two children and moved to London, where she spent much of her life. It was there, while working as a reader for the book publisher Hutchinson, that her literary talent was discovered. The publisher commissioned her to write a novel, giving her an advance of £25. She divorced Gébler in 1967.
By the end of her nearly six-decade-long career, O’Brien had published more than 20 novels, including two sequels and an epilogue to The Country Girls, which entered the Irish literary canon after the country began to liberalize. O’Brien’s subsequent novels often returned to the theme of young girls or women in distress, their desires thwarted, their romantic lives destroyed time and again. Always, the books remained provocative, such as in 1970’s A Pagan Place, in which a priest seduces a young girl.
Beyond the relationship between Ireland and the Church, O’Brien’s novels addressed a wide range of contemporary political issues. 1994’s House of Splendid Isolation, about an encounter between an Irish Republican Army fugitive and a rich, reclusive older woman he’s taken hostage, was published just as peace was being negotiated in Northern Ireland—and features yet another young woman’s affair with a priest. 2016’s The Little Red Chairs features a Bosnian war criminal, hiding out in rural western Ireland and working under the guise of a sex therapist, who ruins a young woman’s marriage. (“O’Brien’s eerily potent gaze into the nature of evil is haunting,” PW said in its review.) Her final novel, Girl, which was published in 2019, was inspired by Boko Haram’s 2014 kidnapping of schoolgirls in Nigeria.
Over the course of her life, O’Brien received numerous accolades from her work, including the 2001 Irish PEN Award for Literature and the PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature; she was named a commander of the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, France’s highest honor for the arts, in 2021. Her final work was a play for the Abbey Theater in Dublin called Joyce's Women, about the women in the life of James Joyce, which was produced in 2022.
O'Brien’s career might be best summed up by Irish president and poet Michael D. Higgins. In awarding O’Brien Ireland’s highest literary accolade, the Saoi of Aosdána, in 2015, Higgins called her “a fearless teller of truth” who remained, throughout her long career, “undaunted, sometimes by culpable incomprehension, authoritarian hostility, and sometimes downright malice.”
On Sunday, in a statement on her death, Higgins called O’Brien “one of the outstanding writers of modern times” and “a fearless teller of truths, a superb writer possessed of the moral courage to confront Irish society with realities long ignored and suppressed. 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.”
