It was from behind the counter of a chemist’s shop that she met Ernest Gebler, a failed Irish-Czech writer (“handsome beyond words, sallow-faced, with dark brown eyes and granite features”) who happened to be married. Six weeks later she moved in with him, a fact of which her mother was apprised one day when, emerging from Mass, she found an anonymous letter on the saddle of her bicycle informing her of her daughter’s “transgressions”.
In response, Edna’s father, assisted by a Cistercian abbot, arrived at Gebler’s house determined to take Edna home and “put her away”. The couple fled to the Isle of Man where they took refuge with the writer JP Donleavy, only for her father and his henchmen to follow in a private plane.
Donleavy broke up the ensuing brawl and, once the plane was safely on its way back to Dublin, Gebler wrote a letter to her parents, “an ugly letter, unsparing of them in every way”, which she signed. Once the “impediments to marriage were overcome” the couple married and settled in the suburbs of London, where they raised two young sons.
But Edna O’Brien soon realised that she had exchanged the restrictions of her religious upbringing for an equally harsh domestic regime. Gebler become jealous, controlling and obsessed with his bowel movements. Galled to find that his wife was a much greater literary talent than he was, he established a regime even fiercer than the one she escaped.
Things reached a crisis on the publication of Country Girls (which she wrote in three weeks and for which she was paid £50), when Gebler scowled at her: “You can write and I will never forgive you.”
Some time after Edna walked out on the marriage a “dossier” arrived – “An obituary, charting our relationship from the day Ernest had lifted me from behind the Dublin shop counter, thinking he had procured a decent companion but instead had found a ‘vainglorious monster, divested of all human traits.’” It took her three years to gain custody of their two sons.
She then reinvented herself as the hostess of swinging 1960s parties in which glamorous literary figures mingled with A-list musicians and film stars. With money received for the film script of Zee and Co, she bought a house in Carlyle Square where Paul McCartney tucked her son up in bed, Samuel Beckett and Lawrence Olivier sang round her piano and Kenneth Tynan brought Princess Margaret, and was furious when Edna did not curtsy. Richard Burton tried to seduce her. He did not succeed, but Robert Mitchum did.
On her many visits to New York, where she taught creative writing, her circle expanded to take in Jackie Kennedy, Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal and RD Laing, with whom she went on a spectacularly bad acid trip, described in her novel, Time and Tide (1993).
The story of Edna O’Brien’s feud with her parents, her exile from Ireland and her emergence as a writer became infinitely more titillating to the newspapers because of the many photographs of her that accompanied the accounts. Her high cheekbones, elegant neck and luxuriant, flame-coloured hair, added to a potent combination that made her irresistible.
Yet Edna O’Brien never bought the hype and remained as dispassionately observant about the flashy, complacent world of London and New York as about her homeland. But Ireland, “a land of shame, a land of murder and a land of strange sacrificial women”, remained her touchstone and the animus against her in the Republic, which banned her first seven novels, remained strong for many years.
When she returned to County Clare on a brief visit, her father threw her out of the house, shouting, “You little shite … always were from the first moment you were born … and always will be.”
Philip Roth once wrote of the “wounded vigour” in Edna O’Brien’s prose and it was hardly surprising that she was subject to anxieties and depression. These led her to seek help from quack doctors, including a self-acclaimed expert on the subject of the human libido who insisted on nudity for massages, “where he pressed his being on the various chakras for added intensity and panted more than was reasonable”.
She always had a weakness for unsuitable men, once describing her ideal date as “to go out with the man I love, who bought me champagne, who didn’t complain about the price … and didn’t tell me how much he loved his wife”.