Edna O’Brien obituary: flamboyant, fearless, and outspoken Irish writer

Born: December 15th, 1930;

Died: July 28th, 2024

The Irish-born, London-based novelist, short-story writer, playwright and screenwriter, Edna O’Brien has died aged 93. A flamboyant, fearless, outspoken and often controversial figure, O’Brien wrote more than 20 novels, biographies of James Joyce and Lord Byron as well as plays, screenplays and a memoir.

Her debut trilogy of novels – The Country Girls (1960), The Lonely Girl [later renamed Girl with Green Eyes] (1962) and Girls in Their Married Bliss (1963) – were famously banned by the Irish censorship board, making them even more sought after by Irish readers. And more than 50 years later in 2019, the trilogy was widely celebrated as Dublin’s One City One Book.

Her other early novels were August is a Wicked Month (1965), A Scandalous Woman (1974) and Johnny I Hardly Knew You (1977). Her later novels include House of Splendid Isolation (1994), Down by the River (1996), In the Forest (2002), The Light of the Evening (2006), The Little Red Chairs (2015) and Girl (2019). O’Brien’s short story collections include Mrs Reinhardt and Other Stories (1978) A Fanatic Heart (1984) and Saints and Sinners (2011). She also adapted her novel, A Pagan Place (1972) for the stage play as well as writing other plays, Our Father (1999) and Haunted (2009). Her version of Euripides’ Iphigenia was staged in 2003.

Assiduous and hard-working, O’Brien also wrote screenplays (I Was Happy Here in 1965 and Zee and Co, 1972) as well as the screenplay for her novel, Girl with the Green Eyes (1964). She also tried her hand at acting, appearing in the television thriller, The Hard Way (1979), with Patrick McGoohan and Lee Van Cleef. And she appeared as herself in the television series, The Life and Loves of a She-Devil (1986). Her memoir, Country Girl was published in 2012.

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Throughout her long life, O’Brien had a well-publicised love-hate relationship with her native country. In Ireland, she said, people were courteous to her face, but slanderous behind her back. But, in the last two decades or so, this relationship changed as younger Irish writers began to view her as the Grand Dame of Irish literature rather than the red-headed rebel from County Clare. She was also very well regarded by many North American writers including Philip Roth and Alice Munro.

O’Brien was the recipient of many awards in her early writing career and latterly. These include the Pen Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature in 2018 and the David Cohen prize for Literature (sometimes described as the Nobel in literature for these islands) in 2019. One of the judges of the Cohen prize described her as “a pivotal figure in the modernisation of Ireland”. Another said that “her writing moved between the political and the personal and lyrical like nobody else currently working today in Britain and Ireland”.

In 2018, she also won the Presidential Distinguished Service award for the Irish abroad and she was appointed a Dame of the British Empire for her services to literature. O’Brien received a Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2012 Irish Book Awards and she was named Commander of the French “Ordre des Arts et Lettres” in 2021. Earlier prizes include the Kingsley Amis Award (1962), the Los Angeles Times Book Prize (1990) and the European Prize for Literature (1995).

O’Brien was conferred with honorary doctorates by Galway University, Queen’s University Belfast and the University of Limerick. In 2006 University College Dublin awarded her the Ulysses Medal, the highest prize the university can bestow. She was also a member of Aosdána and was elected as a Saoi (wise one) in 2015.

Deemed to be ahead of her time in how she raised difficult issues in her writing, she was sometimes subjected to personal attacks by critics and commentators. The profile by New Yorker writer, Ian Parker in 2019 was one such case which prompted two female academics to write articles in defence of O’Brien.

Many of her novels were inspired by real events and real people. For example, her 1994, her novel, In The Forest (2002) was closely based on the murders in 1994 of a young mother, her infant son and a priest near to the writer’s hometown of Tuamgraney in Co Clare. At the time, critics accused her of exploiting the tragedy for personal gain and upsetting the families involved by writing an intrusive and insensitive book. A television documentary, made by O’Brien to coincide with the book’s publication, added to the controversy. She depicted the murdered mother as a mirror image of herself – red-haired, quick-tempered, with a “scandalous” reputation and, quoting Yeats, “too much beauty for luck”. She went on to compare her own loss of youth with the young woman’s violent death.

Her novel, Down by the River was inspired by the famous Irish X case, an underage rape victim who sought an abortion in England. And the main character in House of Splendid Isolation is based on Dominic McGlinchy, the former leader of the Irish National Liberation Army who she visited in Long Kesh prison as part of her research for the novel.

The House of Splendid Isolation was described by one critic as an important example of a “Troubles” novel by a woman writer. Throughout the 1990s, O’Brien followed the Northern Ireland peace negotiations and at one point wrote an open letter to the then British prime minister, Tony Blair, arguing for Gerry Adams to be included in political dialogue. Her book, Girl is a novel about the Boko Haram kidnapping of Nigerian school girls which she travelled to Nigeria to research when in her eighties.

O’Brien once said, “I am seen as a genteel romantic writer. But the reality is I am a savage writer with a savage eye. I write about the things we are not supposed to speak about.”

Her novel, The Light of Evening (2006), was based on her mother’s early life. The author’s fictional self appears as the daughter, Eleanora, a glamorous red-headed writer who makes an unfortunate marriage to a dominating, foreign and much older man – a familiar figure to her readers. Although not self-pitying, she did speak publicly about her alcoholic father, her own troubled marriage and rearing her sons as a single mother in London.

At the age of 92, O’Brien wrote the play, Joyce’s Women, which was shown at the Abbey Theatre as part of the Dublin Theatre Festival. In an interview with The Irish Times at the time, she said that she learned more from Joyce than anyone else in the world. “No other writer has taught me what Joyce taught me which is to get to the pure, to the thing that hurts, to the thing that moves,” she said.

In the aforementioned Irish Times interview, Lara Marlowe described her as “a theatre unto herself, at the same time fierce and vulnerable, serious and flamboyant, proud and self-deprecating, weary and enthusiastic.”

[ Carlo Gébler on his mother Edna O’Brien: Coming to the endOpens in new window ]

Born in Tuamgraney, Co. Clare, the youngest child of Michael O’Brien and Lena Cleary, Edna O’Brien grew up in Drewsboro, a large house set in 242 hectares (600 acres). She completed her secondary school education as a boarder at Convent of Mercy, Loughrea, Co. Galway. She moved to Dublin to work in a chemist while studying at night to become pharmacist. However, she always wanted to be a writer and in 1948 she began writing for the Irish Press.

In 1952, she met the writer, Ernest Gébler, 20 years her senior. When her family disapproved of the relationship, the couple moved to England and married in 1954. They returned to Ireland to live with their two sons, Karl (later Carlo) and Sasha (now known as Marcus) at Lake Park House overlooking Lough Dan in County Wicklow. They later lived in Dublin for a time. Gebler and O’Brien separated in 1964 and divorced in 1968.

O’Brien subsequently moved to London with her two sons where her Chelsea home became a magnet for the literati and glitterati. Her guests at that time included Marlon Brando, Richard Burton, Jane Fonda, Paul McCarthy, VS Naipaul, Jackie Onassis, Vanessa Redgrave, JD Salinger and others. Her flamboyant lifestyle led Vanity Fair to dub her as “The Playgirl of the Western World”.

However, like her famous hero, James Joyce, she did not manage money well. She stopped writing for 10 years and lost her house. In the 1990s, she rented a smaller house in Knightsbridge where she lived for most of the rest of her life.

Although considered by some critics to have a sense of sameness about her plots, O’Brien was applauded for her realistic dialogue, realistic situations and realistic female characters. Her facility with language and character drew comparisons with Virginia Woolf, Dylan Thomas and James Joyce. Philip Roth described her as a consummate stylist, “the most gifted woman now writing fiction in English”.

The late Irish Times literary correspondent, Eileen Battersby described her as a natural writer whose writing was “too honest, too angry, too raw and uncomfortable on occasion in its excess, extremes and lyric melodrama” and yet ahead of its time.

She proudly supported the Irish republican cause. In 1972 she led a march in protest at the jailing of then IRA leader Seán Mac Stiofáin. In The New York Times in 1994 she wrote in praise of Gerry Adams, who, “given a different incarnation”, could have been “one of those monks transcribing the Gospels into Gaelic.” In 2006 she contributed a poem to a book marking the 25th anniversary of the H-Blocks hunger strikes.

She was fully aware that opinion was divided as to whether she was a great character or a colourful self-invention. One journalist likened an interview with her to “trying to share a fervid scene in a play with the leading lady, who has also written the script”.

In 2021, O’Brien donated 50 boxes of manuscripts of her notebooks, drafts, revisions and correspondence from 2009 to 2021 to the National Library to be added to the earlier donation of materials from 2000-2009. In 2000, Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia acquired the author’s archive of papers from 1939-2000. Her portrait by Mandy O’Neill hangs in the National Gallery of Ireland.

Her sons Carlo and Marcus survive her.