NEW YORK — Edna O’Brien, Ireland’s literary pride and outlaw who scandalized her homeland with her debut romance “The Country Girls,” before winning international acclaim as a storyteller and iconoclast who found her welcome everywhere from Dublin to the White House, has died. She was 93 years old.
O’Brien died on Saturday after a long illness, according to a statement from his publisher Faber and literary agency PFD.
“With a defiant and courageous spirit, Edna constantly strived to open new artistic paths, to write sincerely, from a deep feeling,” Faber said in a statement. “Her prose vitality was a mirror of her enthusiasm for life: she was the best company, kind, generous, mischievous, courageous.” She is survived by her sons, Marcus and Carlos.
O’Brien published more than 20 books, most of them novels and story collections, and knew perfectly well what she called “the ends of joy and sorrow, of love, of crossed love and unrequited love, of success and failure, fame and massacre.” Few have so concretely and poetically challenged Ireland’s religious, sexual and gender boundaries. Few have written with such ferocity and sensuality about 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, you might even say, danger to her mortal soul,” Booker Prize winner Anne Enright wrote about her in the Guardian in 2012.
A world traveler in mind and body, O’Brien was as likely to imagine the yearnings of an Irish nun as he was to observe the “boyish smile” of a man in the middle of a “heavy London club.” he claims at the same time that he writes sympathetically about Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams and meets with female farm workers in Nigeria who feared being kidnapped by Boko Haram.
O’Brien was an unknown about to turn 30 and living with her husband and two young children outside London when “The Country Girls” made her the most notorious exile from Ireland 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 travel from a rural convent to the risks and adventures of Dublin. Admirers were as caught up in his defiance and awakening as would-be censors were enraged by passages like “He opened the device and let his pants slide down to his ankles” and “He patted my knees with his other hand. I was excited, warm and violent.”
Fame, whether desired or not, was O’Brien’s legacy forever. His novel was praised and bought in London and New York, while in Ireland it was branded “filthy” by Justice Minister Charles Haughey and publicly burned in O’Brien’s hometown of Tuamgraney, County Clare. husband, writer Ernest Gebler, from whom O’Brien was already distancing herself.
“I had left the spare copy on the hall table for my husband to read if he wished, and one morning he surprised me by appearing very early at the kitchen door, manuscript in hand,” she wrote in her memoir. “Country Girl”, published in 2012. “He had read it. Yes, he had to admit that, despite everything, I had done it, and then he said something that was the death knell of their already struggling marriage: ‘You can write and I will never forgive you.’
She continued the stories of Kate and Baba in “The Lonely Girl” and “Girls in Their Married Bliss” and by the mid-1960s 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 upon meeting her). The other night, she was escorted home by Paul McCartney, who asked to see his children, took his son’s guitar and improvised a song that included the lines about O’Brien “She’ll make you sigh/She’ll make you cry/ Hey/She It will surprise you.”
Enright would call O’Brien “the first Irish woman to have sex. For a few decades, in fact, she was the only Irish woman who had sexual relations – the rest only had children.”
O’Brien was recognized far beyond the world of books. 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 befriended Jacqueline Kennedy, whom O’Brien remembered as a “creature of paradoxes. Although she was private and protected, she was also hungry for intimacy – it was as if the walls she had erected needed to be torn down at times.”
O’Brien identified well with Kennedy’s reticence and longing. The literary world gossiped about the author’s love life, but O’Brien’s deepest existence was on the page, as she addressed a present that seemed borderless (“She longed to be free and young and naked with all the men in the world doing -to love her, all at once”, thinks one of her characters) to resolve a past that seemed full of limits – “what not to do, what not to do and what not to do”.
In her story “The Object of Love,” 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 to the end of an affair, as a man and a woman struggle to recapture their feelings for each other, haunted by grudges and distrust.
“Love, she thought, is like nature, but in reverse; first it bears fruit, then it blossoms, then it seems to wither, then it goes deep, deep into its hole, where no one sees it, where it is lost from sight and finally people die with this secret buried in their souls.” O’Brien wrote.
“A Scandalous Woman” follows the suffocation of a lively young Irish nonconformist – part of that “little solidarity of scandalous women who have conceived children without securing fathers” – and ends with O’Brien condemning her country as a “land of shame, a land of murders and a land of strange sacrificed women.” In “My Two Mothers,” the narrator prays for the chance to “begin our journey again, to live our lives as they should have been lived, happy, confident and free from shame.”
O’Brien’s other books included 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 teenager who becomes pregnant after being raped by her father, and the autobiographical “The Light of Evening”, in which a famous author returns to Ireland to see her sick mother. . “Girl,” a novel about the victims of Boko Haram, was released in 2019.
O’Brien is among the most notable authors never to win the Nobel or even the Booker Prize. Her honors have included the Irish Book Award for Lifetime Achievement, the PEN/Nabokov Award, and the Frank O’Connor Award in 2011 for her story collection “Saints and Sinners,” for which she was praised by poet and juror Thomas McCarthy as “ the one who kept talking when everyone stopped talking about being an Irish woman.”
Josephine Edna O’Brien was one of four children raised on a farm where “the relics of wealth remained. It was a life full of contradictions. We had an avenue, but it was full of holes; There was a concierge, but another couple lived there.” Her father was a violent alcoholic, her mother was a talented letter writer who disapproved of her daughter’s profession, possibly out of jealousy. Lena O’Brien’s hold on her daughter’s imagination, the strength of her regrets, made her a lifelong muse and almost a surrogate in Ireland itself, “the closet with all 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 partly in a convent, “harsh years” made feverish by a disorienting crush she developed on one of the nuns. Language was also a temptation and a sign, like the words she found on the back of her prayer book: “Lord, do not rebuke me in your ghost, nor punish me in your burning displeasure.”
“What does that mean?” she remembered thinking. “It didn’t matter what it meant. It would lead me through lessons and theorems and soggy meat and cabbage, because now, in secret, I had been drawn into the wild heart of things.”
At age 20, she worked in a pharmacy in Dublin and read Tolstoy and Thackeray, among others, in her spare time. She had dreamed of writing since, as a child, she escaped to nearby fields to work on stories, but she doubted the relevance of her life until she read a Joyce anthology and learned that “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” was autobiographical. She began writing fiction published in the literary magazine The Bell and found work reviewing manuscripts for the publisher Hutchinson, where the editors were impressed enough with her summaries to commission what became “The Country Girls.”
“I cried a lot writing ‘The Country Girls,’ but I barely noticed the tears. Either way, they were good tears. They touched on feelings I didn’t know I had. Before my eyes, infinitely clear, there appeared that ancient world in which I believed that our fields and depressions had some ancient music lying dormant, centuries old,” she wrote in her memoirs.
“The words were coming out of me, and the pen above the paper wasn’t moving fast enough, so that sometimes I feared they would be lost forever.”
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