Edna O’Brien, Irish literary giant who wrote ‘The Country Girls’, dies at 93

NEW YORK (AP) — Edna O’Brien, Ireland’s literary pride and outlaw who scandalized her native land with her debut novel “The Country Girls” before achieving international fame as a storyteller and iconoclast welcomed everywhere from Dublin to the White House, has died. She was 93.

O’Brien died Saturday after a long illness, her publisher Faber and literary agency PFD reported.

“Edna was a challenging and courageous spirit, constantly striving to explore new artistic paths, to write truthfully, from a place of deep feeling,” Faber said in a statement. “The vitality of her prose was a reflection of her zest for life: she was the very best of company, kind, generous, mischievous, brave.”

O’Brien published more than 20 books, most of them novels and short story collections, and knew exactly what she called “the extremes of joy and sorrow, love, crossed love and unrequited love, success and failure, fame and carnage.” Few challenged Ireland’s religious, sexual and gender boundaries so concretely and poetically. Few wrote so fiercely, so sensually of loneliness, rebellion, desire and persecution.

“O’Brien is drawn to taboos as soon as they are broken, to the place of greatest heat and darkness and, one might even say, danger to her mortal soul,” Booker Prize winner Anne Enright wrote of her in the Guardian in 2012.

A globetrotter in mind and body, O’Brien could as easily imagine the desires of an Irish nun as the “boyish smile” of a man in the middle of a “heavy London club.” She befriended film stars and heads of state, wrote sympathetically about Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams, and met female farm workers in Nigeria who feared kidnapping by Boko Haram.

O’Brien was an unknown, approaching 30 and living outside London with her husband and two small children, when “The Country Girls” landed her in Ireland’s most notorious exile since James Joyce. Written in just three weeks and published in 1960, for an advance of about $75, “The Country Girls” follows the lives of two young women: Caithleen (Kate) Brady and Bridget (Baba) Brennan, as they journey from a rural convent to the risks and adventures of Dublin. Admirers were as enthralled by their defiance and awakening as would-be censors were enraged by passages like “He opened his braces and let his trousers slide down around my ankles” and “He patted my knees with his other hand. I was excited and hot and violent.”

Fame, whether wanted or not, was O’Brien’s eternal fame. Her novel was praised and bought in London and New York, while in Ireland it was branded ‘filth’ by the Minister of Justice Charles Haughey and publicly burned in O’Brien’s birthplace of Tuamgraney, County Clare. Detractors included O’Brien’s parents and her husband, the author Ernest Gebler, from whom O’Brien was already becoming estranged.

“I had left the spare copy on the hall table for my husband to read if he wanted to, and one morning he surprised me by appearing in the kitchen doorway quite early, manuscript in hand,” she wrote in her memoir “Country Girl,” published in 2012. “He had read it. Yes, he had to admit that I had done so despite everything, and then he said something that sounded the death knell for our already ailing marriage — ‘You can write and I will never forgive you.’”

She continued the Kate and Baba stories in “The Lonely Girl” and “Girls in Their Married Bliss,” and by the mid-’60s she was single and enjoying the heyday of “Swinging London,” whether socializing with Princess Margaret and Marianne Faithfull or having an affair with actor Robert Mitchum (“I bet you’ve never tasted white peaches,” he said when he met her). Another night she was escorted home by Paul McCartney, who asked to see her children, grabbed her son’s guitar and improvised a song that included the lines about O’Brien, “She’ll have you sighing/She’ll have you crying/Hey/She’ll blow your mind away.”

Enright would call O’Brien “the first Irish woman ever to have sex. In fact, for several decades she was the only Irish woman to have had sex — the rest just had children.”

O’Brien was recognized beyond the book world. The 1980s British band Dexy’s Midnight Runners named her alongside Eugene O’Neill, Samuel Beckett, and Oscar Wilde, among others, in the literary tribute “Burn It Down.” She dined at the White House with then-first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton and Jack Nicholson, and she befriended Jacqueline Kennedy, who remembered O’Brien as a “creature of paradoxes.” Though private and private, she also had a hunger for intimacy—it was as if the barriers she had built sometimes needed to be broken down.

O’Brien could relate to Kennedy’s reserve and longing. The literary world gossiped about the author’s love life, but O’Brien’s deepest existence was on the page, from tackling a present that seemed without limits (“She longed to be free and young and naked with all the men in the world making love to her, all at once,” one of her characters thinks) to figuring out a past that seemed fraught with limits — “the things you can’t do and the things you can’t do and the things you can’t do.”

In her story “The Love Object,” the narrator confronts her lust and love for an adulterous family man who only needs to say her name to make her legs tremble. “Long Distance” comes at the end of an affair as a man and a woman struggle to reclaim their feelings for each other, plagued by resentment and mistrust.

“Love, she thought, is like nature, but in reverse; first it bears fruit, then it blossoms, then it seems to wither, then it burrows deep down where no one sees it, where it disappears from view, and finally people die with that secret buried in their souls,” O’Brien wrote.

“A Scandalous Woman” traces the oppression of a vibrant young Irish nonconformist — part of that “little solidarity of scandalous women who had conceived children without finding fathers” — and ends with O’Brien condemning her country as “a land of shame, a land of murder, and a land of strange, sacrificial women.” In “My Two Mothers,” the narrator prays for the chance to “start our journey all over again, to live our lives as they should have been, happily, confidently, and free from shame.”

O’Brien’s other books include the erotic romance “August Is a Wicked Month,” which was based on her time with Mitchum and was banned in parts of Ireland; “Down By The River,” based on a true story about an Irish teenage girl who becomes pregnant after being raped by her father; and the autobiographical “The Light of Evening,” in which a renowned author returns to Ireland to visit her ailing mother. “Girl,” a novel about victims of Boko Haram, was released in 2019.

O’Brien is one of the most notable authors never to have won the Nobel Prize or even the Booker Prize. Her awards include an Irish Book Award for lifetime achievement, the PEN/Nabokov Prize, and the Frank O’Connor Prize in 2011 for her story collection Saints and Sinners, for which she was praised by poet and jury member Thomas McCarthy as “the one who kept talking when everyone else stopped talking about the fact that she was an Irish woman.”

Josephine Edna O’Brien was one of four children raised on a farm where “the remnants of riches remained. It was a life of contradictions. We had a lane, but it was full of potholes; there was a gatehouse, but there was another couple living there.” Her father was an abusive alcoholic, her mother a talented letter-writer who disapproved of her daughter’s profession, perhaps out of jealousy. Lena O’Brien’s hold on her daughter’s imagination, the power of her regrets, made her a lifelong muse and a near-epitome of Ireland itself, “the cupboard with the things in it, the tabernacle with God in it, the lake with the legends in it.”

Like Kate and Baba in “The Country Girls,” O’Brien was educated in part in a convent, “dismal years” that were brought to a fever pitch by a disorienting crush she developed on one of the nuns. Language, too, was a seduction and a guide, like the words she found on the back of her prayer book: “Lord, rebuke me not in your anger, nor chasten me in your hot displeasure.”

“What did it mean?” she thought. “It didn’t matter what it meant. It would get me through lessons and theses and soggy meat and cabbage, because now I was secretly sucked into the wild heart of things.”

In her early twenties, she worked in a Dublin chemist’s and read Tolstoy and Thackeray in her spare time. She had dreamed of writing since she began sneaking into nearby fields as a child to work on stories, but doubted the relevance of her life until she read a Joyce anthology and discovered that “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” was autobiographical. She began writing fiction that appeared in the literary magazine The Bell and found work as a manuscript reviewer for Hutchinson’s publishing house, where editors were so impressed with her summaries that they commissioned what became “The Country Girls.”

“I cried a lot when I wrote ‘The Country Girls,’ but I hardly noticed the tears. Anyway, they were good tears. They touched feelings I didn’t know I had. Before my eyes, infinitely clear, appeared that former world in which I believed our fields and hollows had an old music slumbering within them, ancient,” she wrote in her memoir.

“The words flowed out of me, and the pen over the paper did not move fast enough, so that sometimes I feared they would be lost forever.”