Edna O'Brien

Josephine Edna O'Brien DBE (15 December 1930 – 27 July 2024) was an Irish novelist, memoirist, playwright, poet and short-story writer.

O'Brien's works often revolve around the inner feelings of women and their problems relating to men and society as a whole. Her first novel, The Country Girls (1960), has been credited with breaking silence on sexual matters and social issues during a repressive period in Ireland after the Second World War. The book was banned and denounced from the pulpit. Many of her novels were translated into French. Her memoir, Country Girl, was published in 2012, and her last novel, Girl, was published in 2019. Many of her novels were based in Ireland, especially in County Clare, but Girl was a fictional account of a victim of the 2014 Chibok kidnapping in Nigeria.

In 2015, she was elected to Aosdána by her fellow artists and honoured with the title Saoi. She was the recipient of many other awards and honours, winning the Irish PEN Award in 2001 and the biennial David Cohen Prize in 2019. France made her a Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2021. Her short story collection Saints and Sinners won the 2011 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, the world's richest prize for that genre.

Josephine Edna O'Brien was born on 15 December 1930 to farmer Michael O'Brien and Lena Cleary, at Tuamgraney in County Clare, Ireland, a place she would later describe as "fervid" and "enclosed". She had a Roman Catholic upbringing and was the youngest child of "a strict, religious family". The family lived at "Drewsborough" (also "Drewsboro"), a "large two-storey house", which her mother kept in "semi-grandeur". Michael O'Brien, "whose family had seen wealthier times" as landowners, had inherited a "thousand acres or more" and "a fortune from rich uncles", but was a "profligate" hard-drinker who gambled away his inheritance, the land "sold off in bits ... or bartered to pay debts". Her mother, Lena, "came from a poorer background". 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.

From 1941 to 1946, O'Brien was educated at St. Raphael's College, a boarding school run by the Sisters of Mercy in Loughrea, County Galway, a circumstance that contributed to a "suffocating" childhood. She recalled: "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." Because she deeply missed her mother, she became fond of a nun and tried to identify the nun with herself.

In 1950, having studied at night at a pharmaceutical college and worked in a Dublin pharmacy during the day, O'Brien was awarded a licence as a pharmacist.

In Ireland, O'Brien read such writers as Tolstoy, Thackeray, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. In Dublin, she bought Introducing James Joyce, with an introduction written by T. S. Eliot, and said later 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," she said.

In London, she started work as a reader for Hutchinson, where, based on her reports, she was commissioned for £50 to write a novel. She published her first book, The Country Girls, in 1960. It 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, the books were placed on the censorship index and banned in her native country because of their frank portrayals of the sex lives of their characters. O'Brien herself was accused of "corrupting the minds of young women". She later said, "I felt no fame. I was married. I had young children. All I could hear out of Ireland from my mother and anonymous letters was bile and odium and outrage". The book was also denounced from the pulpit. It had been claimed that copies of The Country Girls were burned when it was published, but according to Mary Kenny, in a letter to The Times in July 2024, an investigation in 2015 found no witnesses or evidence and it was concluded that the story was probably "legend rather than fact".