Ireland Mourns: Iconic Author Edna O’Brien, 93, Passes Away

O’Brien died Saturday after a long illness, according to a statement by her publisher Faber and the literary agency PFD.

NEW YORK — Edna O’Brien, Ireland’s literary pride and outlaw who scandalized her native land with her debut novel “The Country Girls” before gaining international acclaim as a storyteller and iconoclast, has died. She was 93.

O’Brien died Saturday after a long illness, according to a statement by her publisher Faber and the literary agency PFD.

“A defiant and courageous spirit, Edna constantly strove to break new artistic ground, to write truthfully, from a place of deep feeling,” Faber said in a statement. “The vitality of her prose was a mirror of her zest for life: she was the very best company, kind, generous, mischievous, brave.” She is survived by her sons, Marcus and Carlos.

O’Brien published more than 20 books, most of them novels and story collections. She fully understood what she called the “extremities of joy and sorrow, love, crossed love and unrequited love, success and failure, fame and slaughter.” Few challenged Ireland’s religious, sexual, and gender norms as concretely and poetically. Few wrote so fiercely and sensually about loneliness, rebellion, desire, and persecution.

“O’Brien is attracted to taboos just as they break, to the place of greatest heat and darkness,” Booker Prize winner Anne Enright wrote of her in the Guardian in 2012.

A world traveler in mind and body, O’Brien could imagine both the longings of an Irish nun and the atmosphere of a “ponderous London club.” She mingled with movie stars and heads of states while also writing sympathetically about Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams and meeting with female farm workers in Nigeria who feared abduction by Boko Haram.

O’Brien was an unknown about to turn 30, living with her husband and two small children outside of London when “The Country Girls” made her Ireland’s most notorious exile since James Joyce. Written in just three weeks and published in 1960, the novel chronicles the lives of two young women, Caithleen Brady and Bridget Brennan, as they navigate from a rural convent to the adventures of Dublin. Admirers were as caught up in their defiance as censors were enraged by such passages as “He opened his braces and let his trousers slip down around the ankles” and “He patted my knees with his other hand. I was excited and warm and violent.”

Fame, wanted or otherwise, followed O’Brien. Her novel was praised and purchased in London and New York, but in Ireland, it was labeled “filth” by Minister of Justice Charles Haughey and even burned publicly in her hometown of Tuamgraney, County Clare. Detractors included O’Brien’s parents and her husband, author Ernest Gebler, from whom she was already becoming estranged.

“I had left the spare copy on the hall table for my husband to read, should he wish, and one morning he surprised me by appearing quite early in the doorway of the kitchen, the manuscript in his hand,” she wrote in her memoir “Country Girl,” published in 2012. “He had read it. Yes, he had to concede that despite everything, I had done it, and then he said something that was the death knell of the already ailing marriage — ‘You can write and I will never forgive you.’”

She continued the stories of Kate and Baba in “The Lonely Girl” and “Girls in Their Married Bliss.” By the mid-1960s, O’Brien was single and enjoying the prime of “Swinging London”: socializing with Princess Margaret and Marianne Faithfull, or having a fling with actor Robert Mitchum. Paul McCartney even improvised a song about her: “She’ll have you sighing/She’ll have you crying/Hey/She’ll blow your mind away.”

Enright would call O’Brien “the first Irish woman ever to have sex. For some decades, indeed, she was the only Irish woman to have had sex — the rest just had children.”

O’Brien’s recognition extended beyond literature. The 1980s British band Dexy’s Midnight Runners named her among literary giants in “Burn It Down.” She dined at the White House with first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton and Jack Nicholson and befriended Jacqueline Kennedy.

The literary world gossiped about O’Brien’s love life, but her deepest existence was on the page. She addressed a present of few boundaries and a past of strict conventions. In her story “The Love Object,” she writes about an adulterous family man who need only say her name to make her legs tremble. “Long Distance” captures the end of an affair as a couple struggles with lingering feelings.

“Love, she thought, is like nature but in reverse; first it fruits, then it flowers, then it seems to wither, then it goes deep, deep down into its burrow,” O’Brien wrote.

“A Scandalous Woman” portrays a lively Irish nonconformist in a land of shame and murder. In “My Two Mothers,” the narrator prays for lives lived happily and free of shame.

Her other works included “August Is a Wicked Month,” “Down By The River,” and the autobiographical “The Light of Evening.” Her novel “Girl,” about Boko Haram’s victims, was released in 2019.

Despite never winning the Nobel or Booker Prize, O’Brien received numerous honors, including an Irish Book Award for lifetime achievement and the PEN/Nabokov prize. She made a lasting impact with her story collection “Saints and Sinners.”

Josephine Edna O’Brien was one of four children raised on a farm where “the relics of riches remained.” Her early environment was one of contradictions. Her father was a violent alcoholic, her mother a talented letter writer who disapproved of her daughter’s profession, possibly out of jealousy. Lena O’Brien powerfully influenced her daughter’s imagination and work.

Like Kate and Baba in “The Country Girls,” O’Brien was partly educated at a convent, made feverish by a disorienting crush on a nun. Language was a temptation and guide, exemplified by the words on her prayer book: “Lord, rebuke me not in thy wraith, neither chasten me in thy hot displeasure.”

By her early 20s, she worked in a Dublin pharmacy and read voraciously. She dreamed of writing early on but doubted her life’s relevance until reading about James Joyce. She began writing fiction and working for a publishing house, where her edits led to the commission of “The Country Girls.”

“I cried a lot writing ‘The Country Girls,’ but scarcely noticed the tears,” she wrote in her memoir. “The words poured out of me, and the pen above the paper was not moving fast enough.”

Local News: Recent Coverage