The Irish writer Edna O’Brien, who explored the complications and contradictions of women’s lives in a literary career lasting more than half a century, has died aged 93 after a long illness, her agent has announced.
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. 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”.
Paying tribute to the author, her publisher, Faber, said she was “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.
“Edna was a dear friend to us all, and we will miss her dreadfully. It is Faber’s huge privilege to publish her, and her bold and brilliant body of work lives on.”
Born in a village in County Clare in 1930, O’Brien was the youngest of a large family with a father who was a drinker and a gambler – a childhood she recalled as full of “money troubles, drink troubles, all sorts of troubles”. After qualifying as a pharmacist in 1950, she married the 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”.
When the couple moved to London with their two sons in 1959, O’Brien started working as a reader for the publisher Hutchinson, which soon commissioned her to produce a novel.
Written in three weeks, The Country Girls crackles with wit and feeling as it follows Caithleen and Baba from dreaming of romance at their convent boarding school to abandonment in Dublin. When it was published in 1960, Kingsley Amis saluted its “unphony charm and unlaborious originality”, while it was greeted with consternation across the Irish Sea.
Writing in 2008, O’Brien said she had received anonymous letters, “all malicious”, and the “few copies purchased in Limerick were burnt after the rosary, one evening in the parish grounds, at the request of the priest”.
The novel 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.
O’Brien’s own marriage came to an end in 1967, but the fiction continued. A young girl is seduced by a priest in 1970’s A Pagan Place, a novel whose narrator addresses herself in the second person, while Time and Tide, published in 1992, offers a bleak portrait of a woman going through an awkward divorce and battling for custody of her two sons. Life as a single mother was hard, she remembered in 2011, “but I was able to do it. I seemed to have endless energy at the time: I could cook and clean, and write.”
House of Splendid Isolation, published months before the 1994 IRA ceasefire, marked a broadening of O’Brien’s concerns, with its story of an unlikely friendship between a terrorist and an elderly widow. Down By the River tackled controversies over abortion, while Wild Decembers examined the confrontation between modernity and tradition.
A series of prizes including the 2001 Irish PEN lifetime achievement award and the 2006 Ulysses medal revealed shifting attitudes in her homeland. The transformation was complete when the Irish president, Michael D Higgins, gave her the country’s highest literary accolade, the Saoi of Aosdána, in 2015, and called her a “fearless teller of truth” who had continued to write “undaunted, sometimes by culpable incomprehension, authoritarian hostility and sometimes downright malice”.
Higgins said on Sunday: “Edna O’Brien has been one of the outstanding writers of modern times, her work has been sought as model all around the world.
“Edna was 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.”
Her masterpiece, according to Roth, was published later that year. The Little Red Chairs opens when a wanted Balkan war criminal turns up in “a freezing backwater that passes for a town” on the west coast of Ireland and ends among exploited migrant workers in London. Writing in the Guardian, Julie Myerson called it “utterly original, urgent, beautiful”, declaring it “hard – no, almost impossible – to believe that O’Brien is in her ninth decade, for this is absolutely the work of a writer in her prime and at the very height of her phenomenal powers”.
Speaking in 1999, O’Brien confessed she found writing very hard. “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. “But that’s the bargain. Mephistopheles didn’t come, you know. He was already there.”