Female friendship, intense longing and unapologetic sex – Edna O’Brien, who died yesterday aged 93, was scandalising Ireland with stories about the interior lives and erotic adventures of young women 50 years before Sally Rooney was born. “The Country Girls is not the novel that broke the mould, it is the one that made it … O’Brien gave voice to a previously muzzled generation of Irish women,” A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing author Eimear McBride wrote of O’Brien’s 1960 first novel. The Country Girls was famously banned in Ireland, copies were burnt by priests and the local postmistress in the village where O’Brien grew up said she “should be kicked naked through the streets”. Even the author’s own mother declared her a disgrace.
While she was famous for sex, she was writing – lyrically, sentimentally sometimes – about love, which, as fellow Irish novelist Anne Enright pointed out in her review of Rooney’s most recent novel, always makes some people cross. O’Brien herself felt that her great subject was loss – “loss of love, loss of self, loss of God.” In a conversation with Philip Roth, who declared her “the most gifted woman now writing fiction in English”, back in 1984, she said: “Love replaced religion for me in my sense of fervor. When I began to look for earthly love (ie, sex), I felt that I was cutting myself off from God.”
For the six decades after The Country Girls, spent mainly in London, O’Brien remained a glamorous, faintly scandalous figure, friends with many of the giants of the era – Roth, but also Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow and Marlon Brando. She took LSD with RD Laing and held starry soirees in her Chelsea flat, not to mention the legendary love affairs; Playgirl of the Western World was the headline of a 1992 Vanity Fair profile. As she pointed out, she wouldn’t have been able to write nearly 40 books, as well as a number of plays, and raise her two sons after her divorce from Ernest Gébler, if this reputation was the full picture. She was still causing controversy with her final novel, Girl, about the Nigerian schoolgirls kidnapped by Boko Haram jihadists, published in 2019, when she was 88.
O’Brien was a writer with a capital W, in the vein of her great heroes James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, but with wilder parties. “Writing is my breathing,” she would say. She considered it a vocation “like being a nun or a priest”, putting in the hours “as an athlete does at his training”. But it was more elemental to her even than faith or an innate physical gift. She told the Paris Review: “Writing is like carrying a foetus. I get up in the morning, have a cup of tea and come into this room to work.”
As her editor at Faber observed, O’Brien took the old-fashioned view that great art involved, demanded even, great suffering on the part of its creator. For her writing was always “an eminently masochistic exercise”, derived from inner conflict or “an innate sense of tragedy”.
While her early novels chimed with the nascent 60s feminism, O’Brien, like Doris Lessing, was “no darling of the feminists”, as she put it. Instead, she insisted that what she regarded as the fundamental differences between the sexes most interested her as a writer: “Of course I would like women to have a better time but I don’t see it happening, and for a very simple and primal reason: people are pretty savage towards each other, be they men or women.”
O’Brien cut a striking figure at literary events, always elegantly, dramatically dressed, often in black. “I am capable of real anger, because I am a passionate and furious creature as well as being a rather tender one. I am capable of Medea murder, but I am not old and bitter,” she told the Observer in 2019. Years ago, she gave me the Medea treatment at a garden party, when I was a fledgling literary editor and had declined (rashly it seemed at that moment) an extract from her new novel. She wrote a gracious letter afterwards, that a much less grand writer might have considered unnecessary. And it was thrilling (if terrifying) to be scolded by such a passionate and furious creature.
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When young women today read Sally Rooney (or Enright or McBride or any of the many acclaimed female Irish writers) and see themselves reflected in their pages, we have to thank in some small part the fearlessness and spirit of that Catholic girl from County Clare so many years earlier. O’Brien took her writing seriously, and so eventually did her country (she was given the 2001 Irish PEN lifetime achievement award), and the literary establishment of which she became such a talismanic part. As O’Brien herself observed, they don’t make writers like her any more, and the books world (and its parties) will be much more dull without her. “I want to go out as someone who kept to the truth,” she said in one of her final interviews. “I can’t bear phoneys. I want integrity.”