Irish author Edna O'Brien, who explored the complications and contradictions of women's lives in a literary career lasting more than half a century, died July 27 at age 93. In a series of novels beginning with The Country Girls "that were at first banned in Ireland but feted abroad, O'Brien gave voice to women struggling with the oppressive and hypocritical expectations of rural life," the Guardian wrote. "Her focus widened in later works such as House of Splendid Isolation and The Little Red Chairs, but always maintained the keen intelligence and daring that made Philip Roth once hail her as 'the most gifted woman now writing fiction in English.' "
In 1950, after leaving a convent where she was being educated and considered being a nun, she married writer Ernest Gébler against her family's wishes--a hurried decision she described in 2011 as going "from them, to him; from one house of control, to another." The couple moved to London with their two sons in 1959, and O'Brien started working as a reader for the publisher Hutchinson, which soon commissioned her to write a novel.
The Country Girls, written in three weeks, "was swiftly banned in Ireland, as were O'Brien's next six novels, beginning with two sequels that completed The Country Girls' inevitable trajectory: 1962's The Lonely Girl, and 1964's mordantly-titled Girls in Their Married Bliss," the Guardian wrote.
After her marriage ended in 1967, O'Brien continued to publishing novels and story collections, including A Pagan Place, Time and Tide, House of Splendid Isolation, Down by the River, Wild Decembers, In the Forest, Girl, August Is a Wicked Month, and The Little Red Chairs. She also wrote a short biography of James Joyce in 1999 and Byron in Love, about the poet's love life, in 2009. Her play Virginia was about Virginia Woolf. Some of her novels were less autobiographical and featured protagonists who included a Serbian war criminal masquerading in Ireland as a sex therapist, an IRA killer, a serial killer, and girls abused by Boko Haram. Her memoir, Country Girl, was published in 2012.
Her awards included the 2001 Irish PEN lifetime achievement award, the 2006 Ulysses medal from University College Dublin, the 2011 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award for "Saints and Sinners," the 2018 PEN/Nabokov Award, and the 2019 David Cohen Prize for Literature. In a move that demonstrated changed attitudes in Ireland, President Higgins awarded her the country's highest literary accolade, the Saoi of Aosdána, in 2015. Also, in 2018, she was made a Dame of the Order of the British Empire.
In a statement, Irish President Michael D. Higgins said, "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. While the beauty of her work was immediately recognized abroad, it is important to remember the hostile reaction it provoked among those who wished for the lived experience of women to remain far from the world of Irish literature, with her books shamefully banned upon their early publication. Thankfully Edna O'Brien's work is now recognized for the superb works of art which they are."
Faber, her publisher, called O'Brien "one of the greatest writers of our age. She revolutionised Irish literature, capturing the lives of women and the complexities of the human condition in prose that was luminous and spare, and which had a profound influence on so many writers who followed her. A defiant and courageous spirit, Edna constantly strove to break new artistic ground, to write truthfully, from a place of deep feeling. The vitality of her prose was a mirror of her zest for life: she was the very best company, kind, generous, mischievous, brave."
"In some ways I suppose a lot of the material of my life has been ripe for literature, but a bit of a handicap for what is laughingly called everyday life," she said in 1999. "But that's the bargain. Mephistopheles didn't come, you know. He was already there."
In the New York Times, critic Lucy Scholes recalled interviewing O'Brien in 2015: "At one point, we discussed critics who'd diminished her subject matter as 'the narrow world of the heart.' She'd almost roared her response. 'Well, the heart ain't that narrow, and the heart keeps beating!' "
An omnibus edition of Country Girls, The Lonely Girl, and Girls in Their Married Bliss titled The Country Girls: Three Novels and an Epilogue is available from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
