 
Choose another writer in this calendar:
by name: by birthday from the calendar.
|
|
Edna O'Brien (1932-2024) |
|
Irish writer, famous for her rich and sensuous prose. Edna 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, were banned in Ireland. Her works gained wide acclaim, particularly among American readers. I wakened quickly and sat up in bed abruptly. It is only when I am anxious that I waken easily and for a minute I did not know why my heart was beating faster than usual. Then I remembered. The old reasons. He had not come home. (the opening of The Country Girls by Edna O'Brien, Penguin Books, 1987, p. 5; first published in 1960) Edna O'Brien was born in Twamgraney, County Clare, to Michael and
Lena (Helena, née Cleary) O'Brien. She was the youngest of four
surviving children. Her family was
opposed to anything to do with literature and later she described her
small village "enclosed, fervid and bigoted." There were no books in
their house, except for one cookery book, bloodstock manuals and prayer
books. Speaking of her background, she once said of coming "from a very
wild place. People don't behave with the normal etiquette, It's like
Chekhov's Russia." (Edna O'Brien and the Art of Fiction by Maureen O'Connor, 2022, p. 2) O'Brien developed a love of words; she believed they had magical associations. 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. She once said, that reading Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species dislodged much of her religious education. Married in the summer
of 1954, O'Brien moved with her husband, the Czech/Irish writer Ernest
Gébler, and two sons to London.
Gébler first novel, The Plymouth Adventure
(1950) had been a bestseller in the Unites States, where it was made
into a film by Clarence Brown, starring Spencer Tracy and Gene Tierney.
In Ireland O'Brien 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 James 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. Originally it was commissioned by the publisher
Hutchinson, where she was employed as a reader of manuscript. 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. But any book, that is any good must be, to some
extent, autobiographicak, because one cannot and should not fabricate
emotions, and although style and narrative are crucial, the bulwark,
emotion, is what finally matters." ('Edna O'Brien,' in Writers at Work: Sevents Series, edited by George Plimpton, introduction by John Updike, 1986, p. 245) Although some of the reviews were good, many readers were shocked in Ireland and the book was banned there. The Country Girls continued in The Lonely Girl (1962) and Girls in Their Married Bliss
(1964). These books catapulted O'Brien into international literary
fame; she has made headlines ever since. James Wolkott called her in Vanity Fair (June
1992) "The "Playgirl of the Western World" and her name was linked to
such film stars as Marlon Brando and Robert Mitchum. Private Eye parodied her public image with a fake promo for a show called Edna: "She came to London and drowned in a sea of men." 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. Five of O'Brien's first novel were banned in Ireland. Casualties of Peace (1966) led to the formation of a Censorship Reform Society. 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: a woman
turns into an avenger, and murders her younger lover for the past
betrayals of her other loves. Before writing Night
(1972), O'Brien was a patient of the Scottish psychiatrist R.D. Laing
(1927-1989), and took LSD with him. "He was quite a beguiling man,"
O'Brien said later in an interview. "He was also nuts." ('Novelist Edna O’Brien Explores the True Nature of Evil' by Ron Rosenbaum, Smithsonian Magazine, July 2016) Sean Connery
warned her not to take LSD because he had a bad trip when he tried the
drug himself. 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." (Mother Ireland, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976, p. 11) 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,
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 bullockbefriending bard, a peerless
mummer, a priestified kinchite, a quill-frocked friar, a timoneer, a
pool-beg flasherand a man with the gift of the Irish majuscule scrip." He was "a man of profligate tastes and blatant
inconsistencies,"
who "went from childlike
tenderness to a scathing indifference, from craven piety to doubt and
rebellion. His first sexual arousal happened when he was twelve and
walking home with a young nurse who told him to turn away when she
urinated. The sound of this was an excitement to him." (Ibid., Viking, 1999, pp. 1-7) O'Brien's favorite novelist of al time is Leo Tolstoy. In several of her works O'Brien 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.) The Little Red Chairs
(2015),
O'Brien's seventeeth novel, was about what evil does in the world. The
central character is a Bosnian Serb war criminal, who has begun a new
life in a little Irish town. "What is extraordinary and unsettling
about O’Brien’s novel is the way that it begins in an atmosphere of
something approaching pastoral comedy, and steadily darkens as we
become acquainted with the buried but unrepressed war crimes of the
town’s resident trickster." (James Wood, in The New Yorker, April 25, 2016 Issue.) Girl (2019), about the young girls kidnapped by the militant Islamist group Boko Haram in Nigeria, won the South Bank Sky Arts award. "I went to Nigeria twice – that was no fun and games. What was terrifying was to try and make a kind of mythic story from all this pain and horror." ('Edna O’Brien on turning 90: ‘I can’t pretend that I haven’t made mistakes’' by Sarah Hughes, The Guardian, 13 December 2020) In 2018 O'Brien was one of the finalists in Clare's Greatest Ever Person, sponsored by the Irish radion station Clare FM. She was named Commander of the French Ordre des Arts et Lettres in 2021. Edna O'Brien died on July 27, 2024, in London. For further reading: Modernism in Irish Women's Contemporary Writing by Paige Reynolds (2023); Edna O'Brien and the Art of Fiction by Maureen O'Connor (2022); Fine Meshwork: Philip Roth, Edna O'Brien, and Jewish Irish Literature by Dan O'Brien (2020); Conversations with Edna O'Brien, edited by Alice Hughes Kersnowski (2014); 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); 'O'Brien, Edna,' in 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 Genie Malachy 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. Selected works:
|
