Edna O’Brien, Ireland’s daring chronicler of women’s lives, dies at 93

By Graham Fahy

DUBLIN (Reuters) – Edna O’Brien, the author who wrote of her native Ireland in such febrile prose, steeped in sex, love and religious angst, that it sparked national outrage and led to her self-imposed exile, has died aged 93, her agent said on Sunday.

Her 1960 literary debut stirred national contempt in then-staunchly Catholic and conservative Ireland, prompting a priest in her hometown to call for it to be burned. The culture minister of the time branded it “a smear on Irish womanhood”.

But when a selection of her personal papers was added to Ireland’s national library in 2021, Culture Minister Catherine Martin cited O’Brien’s unique importance as a novelist and chronicler of a country that had once shunned and reviled her.

“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,” Irish President Michael D. Higgins said in a statement on Sunday, describing O’Brien as a dear friend.

“While the beauty of her work was immediately recognised abroad, it is important to remember the hostile reaction it provoked among those who wished for the lived experience of women to remain far from the world of Irish literature… Thankfully Edna O’Brien’s work is now recognised for the superb works of art which they are.”

O’Brien died peacefully on Saturday after a long illness, her agent said in a statement.

In a career spanning more than 60 years, O’Brien wrote more than 20 novels and worked well into her 90s. Such was the universal appeal of her portrayal of women’s experiences, she received France’s highest cultural distinction in 2021.

Born in the western county of Clare in 1930, O’Brien grew up in a well-to-do Catholic family that had fallen on hard times. Educated at a convent, she fled her parents’ guilt-inducing influence as a teenager to train as a pharmacist in Dublin.

In 1954, to the fury of her family, she married the Czech-Irish writer Ernest Gébler, 22 years her senior. They moved to London where she worked as a reader for a publishing house, which then commissioned her to write.

Her frank treatment of sexuality in a trilogy of novels that began with “The Country Girls” and included “The Lonely Girl” and “Girls in Their Married Bliss”, scandalised Irish society. Her first six novels were banned by the Irish censor.

The moral hysteria that in particular greeted “The Country Girls”, a novel based on the sexual awakening of two girls from the west of Ireland, ensured that O’Brien and the book became, for Irish novelist Eimear McBride, “era-defining symbols of the struggle for Irish women’s voices to be heard”.

“Edna’s work shattered silences, broke open new ground, stirred deep recognitions,” another Irish novelist Joseph O’Connor said in a tribute to O’Brien on her 90th birthday. “Writing is why she was put here.”

Gébler’s resentment of O’Brien’s literary achievements later led to divorce. She was left alone with two young sons when it was scandalous to be a single mother.

A bohemian period that followed included a brief relationship with actor Robert Mitchum, and parties at her house in Chelsea where Laurence Olivier sang hymns, British Prime Minister Harold Wilson danced, and Ingrid Bergman arrived “in a coat with a high fur collar”.

Vanity Fair called her the “Playgirl of the Western World,” a reference to another Irish writer J.M. Synge’s 1907 play “The Playboy of the Western World”.

O’Brien also wrote five plays and four works of non-fiction.

Her latest novel, “Girl”, a 2019 tale about the girls kidnapped in Nigeria by Islamist Boko Haram militants, included research trips to West Africa while in her late 80s.

In 2015, Irish President Higgins apologised for the scorn once heaped on O’Brien in her now socially transformed homeland.

“I did not have that brilliant a life in many ways,” O’Brien told The Guardian newspaper in 2020.

“It was quite difficult and that’s not said in self-pity. But one thing that is true is that language and the mystery of language and the miracle of language has, as that lovely song Carrickfergus says, carried me over.”