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Edna O'Brien (1932-) |
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Irish writer, famous for her rich and sensuous prose. O'Brien made her breakthrough with "The Country Girls Trilogy" (1960-64). Several of O'Brien's books, dealing with childhood and disappointments in sexual love, have been banned in Ireland. Her works have gained wide acclaim, particularly among American readers. "They used to ban my books, but now when I go there, people are courteous to my face, though rather slanderous behind my back. Then again, Ireland has changed. There are a lot of young people who are irreligious, or less religious. Ironically, they wouldn't be interested in my early books – they would think them gauche. They are aping English and American mores. If I went to a dance hall in Dublin now I would feel as alien as in a disco in Oklahoma." (O'Brien in Writers at Work, ed. George Plimpton, 1986) Edna O'Brien was born in Twamgraney, County Clare. Her family was opposed to anything to do with literature and later she described her small village "enclosed, fervid and bigoted." When O'Brien was a student in Dublin and her mother found a book of Sean O'Casey in her suitcase she wanted to burn it. After finishing primary school O'Brien was educated at the Convent of Mercy in Loughrea (1941-46). In Dublin she worked in a pharmacy, and studied at the Pharmaceutical College at night. During this period she wrote small pieces for the Irish Press. In 1950 she was awarded a licence as pharmacist. Married in the summer of 1954, O'Brien moved with her husband, the Czech/Irish writer Ernest Gébler, and two sons to London. In Ireland she read such writers Tolstoy, Thackeray, F. Scott Fitzgerald. The first book O'Brien ever bought was Introducing James Joyce by T.S. Eliot. She has said that Joyce's Portrait of the Artist made her realize that she wanted literature for the rest of her life. O'Brien wrote her first novel, The Country Girls (1960), in about three weeks. The story is partly based on the author's own experiences being brought up in a convent. "The novel is autobiographical insofar I was born and bred in the west of Ireland, educated at a convent, and was full of romantic yearnings, coupled with a sense of outrage." (O'Brien in Writers at Work) Although some of the reviews were good, many readers were outraged in Ireland and the book was banned there. The Country Girls continued in The Lonely Girl (1962) and Girls in Their Married Bliss (1964). The trilogy traced the lives of two Irish women, Kate and Baba, from their school days in the Irish countryside to their disillusioned adulthood and failed marriages in London. The friends have a strict Roman Catholic upbringing, which comes into conflict with their sexuality and their dependence on men. Kathy's relationship with a married man is fruitless. She starts an affair with Eugene, whom she considers a great lover but not much else. Her marriage with Eugene is unlucky, and they separate. Baba marries a man who offers her financial security. Because of the graphic sexual content of the story, the whole trilogy, and six of the author's subsequent works, were banned in Ireland. "While feminists have not been fond of her work because of her heroines' chasing after men, ''The Country Girls Trilogy'' is a powerful argument for feminism. To watch Kate and Baba and their various partners making war, not love, reminds us of ignorant armies that clash by night." (Anatole Broyard in The New York Times, May 11, 1986) In 1986, the three novels with an epilogue were published in one volume as The Country Girls Trilogy and Epilogue. In A Pagan Place (1971) O'Brien returned to the Ireland of her childhood. The novel told the story of a girl, who is seduced by a priest. Johnny I Hardly Knew You (1977) changes the roles of victim and oppressor. In the story a woman turns into an avenger, and murders her younger lover for the past betrayals of her other loves. O'Brien has written plays, children's books, essays, screenplays, and non-fiction about Ireland. "Countries are either mothers or fathers, and engender the emotional bristle secretly reserved for either sire. Ireland has always been a woman, a womb, a cave, a cow, a Rosaleen, a sow, a bride, a harlot, and, of course, the gaunt Hag of Beare." (in Mother Ireland, 1976) She has received several literary awards, including the Kingsley Amis Award for fiction in 1962, the Yorkshire Post Novel Award in 1971, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in 1990 for Lantern Slides, a collection of short stories, set primarily in Ireland. Virginia (1981) her play about Virginia Woolf presented the softer side of the feminist writer, her need for affection. It was staged at the Public Theater in New York in the spring of 1985. As a short story writer she has published regularly in the New Yorker. Mother Ireland (1976), O'Brien's tribute to her homeland, appeared in 1977. It includes seven autobiographical essays, in which O'Brien weaves her own personal history with local customs and ancient lore of Ireland. O'Brien's other non-fiction works include James and Nora, a study of James Joyce's marriage. She returned to the life of the great writer in her biography about James Joyce in 1999. In her short sketches she describes him as "a man of profligate tastes and blatant inconsistencies", "a bullockbefriending bard", who "went from childlike tenderness to a scathing indifference, from craven piety to doubt and rebellion." In several of her works O'Brien has focused on the bitterness of women who have experienced failures in their relationship with men. Her women are often victims of their upbringing and her male characters violent or weak or treacherous, as in Time and Tide (1992), which tells of Nell Steadman, an Irish editor living in London, her disappointments in love, and marriage with a sadistic husband. The novel Dowen by the River (1997) is based on a true-life legal and moral battle in 1992, when a 14-year-old girl, the purported victim of rape, sought an abortion in England. The protagonist of the novel is Mary, almost 14 years old and pregnant by her widowed father. She tries to drown herself, but is rescued by a neighbor, Betty, who takes her to England for a legal abortion. Before the operation can occur, Mary is pressured to return to Ireland. There she becomes the focal point in a nationwide fruitless debate about abortion, until nature solves her problem. O'Brien also fictionalized real-life events in the novel In the Forest (2002), the story of a mad, institutionalized boy, Michen, and his victims. "Skilful use of court records, psychiatrists' reports and Ms O'Brien's empathetic imagination, have resulted in a series of brief, juxtaposed, sometimes first-person chapters in which the dramatis personae propel the story forward. Particularly good is the way the two main characters – Michen and Eily, his victim – are balanced in a poetical, doomed dance, so that the narrative becomes their joint Greek tragedy." (Barbara Trapido in The Independent, 12 May, 2002.) For further reading: The Role of Irish Women in the Writings of Edna O’Brien: Mothering the Continuation of the Irish Nation by Helen Thompson (2010); Edna O’Brien: New Critical Perspectives, eds. Kathryn Laing, Sinéad Mooney, Maureen O’Connor (2006);Wild Colonial Girl: Essays on Edna O’Brien, edited by Lisa Colletta and Maureen O’Connor (2006); Edna O'Brien by Bernice Schrank (1999); Encyclopedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, Vol. 3, ed. Steven R. Serafin (1999); The Comic Tradition in Irish Women Writers, ed. by Theresa O’Connor (1996); Writers at Work, ed. by George Plimpton (1986); Twentieth-century Women Novelists, ed. Thomas F. Staley (1982); 'Edna O’Brien' by William Trevor, in Contemporary Novelists (1976); Edna O’Brien by Grace Eckley (1974) - Note: Edna O'Brien's and Ernerst Gébler's son Carlo Gébler has also gained fame as a writer. His first novel, The Eleventh Summer was published in 1985. In his early novels Gébler has explored family difficulties. He has published non-fiction, children's books and written for film. In 1993 he made a six-part documentary for the BBC entitled Plain Tales from Northern Ireland. Works: The Eleventh Summer (1985), August in July (1986), Work and Play (1987), Driving through Cuba (1988), The TV GenieMalachy and His Family (1990), The Witch That Wasn't (1991), The Class Curtain (1991), Life of a Drum (1991), The Cure (1994). Gébler's book of memoir, Father & I (2001), was about his brutish father. (1989), Selected works:
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