Edna O’Brien, an author who wrote about her native Ireland, has died aged 93, her agent confirmed on Sunday. The writer of the novels The country girls, The girl with green eyes y Happily married girls died on Saturday after “a long illness,” according to a statement from his agent.
His literary debut in 1960, The country girlssparked national scorn in Ireland, which was then staunchly Catholic and conservative, with even a priest in her hometown calling for it to be burned. The culture minister at the time called it a “stain on Irish womanhood.” But when a selection of her personal papers were added to Ireland’s national library in 2021, culture minister Catherine Martin acknowledged O’Brien’s unique importance as a novelist and chronicler of a country that had once shunned and vilified her.
“Edna was a fearless truth-teller, a superb writer who possessed the moral courage to confront Irish society with long-ignored and repressed realities,” Irish President Michael D. Higgins said in a statement 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 to keep the lived experience of women away from the world of Irish literature. Thankfully, Edna O’Brien’s work is now recognised as the magnificent works of art that they are.”
In a career spanning more than 60 years, O’Brien wrote more than 20 novels and worked well into the 1990s. Such was the universal appeal of her portrayal of women’s experiences that she was awarded France’s highest cultural distinction in 2021.
Born in western County Clare in 1930, O’Brien grew up in a well-to-do Catholic family that had fallen on hard times. Educated in a convent, she fled her parents’ guilty influence as a teenager to train as a pharmacist in Dublin. In 1954 she married the Czech-Irish writer Ernest Gébler, 22 years her senior. They moved to London, where she worked for a publishing house, which then commissioned her to write.
His frank treatment of sexuality in the trilogy of novels that began The country girls scandalized Irish society. Her first six novels were banned by Irish censorship. The moral hysteria she unleashed in particular The country girlsa novel based on the sexual awakening of two girls from the west of Ireland, made O’Brien and the book, for the Irish novelist Eimear McBride, “symbols that defined an era of the struggle for Irish women’s voices to be heard.” “Edna’s work broke silences, broke new ground, provoked profound recognitions,” said another Irish novelist, Joseph O’Connor, in a tribute to O’Brien on her 90th birthday. “Writing is the reason she was put here.”
Gébler’s resentment of O’Brien’s literary achievements later led to her divorce. She was left alone with two young children at a time when it was scandalous to be a single mother. She also had a brief relationship with the actor Robert Mitchum and held parties at her Chelsea home where Laurence Olivier sang hymns, British Prime Minister Harold Wilson danced and Ingrid Bergman arrived “in a coat with a high fur collar”.
O’Brien also wrote five plays and four works of nonfiction. His latest novel, The girla 2019 account of girls kidnapped in Nigeria by Islamist Boko Haram militants, included research trips to West Africa when she was in her 80s.
In 2015, Irish President Higgins apologized for the scorn once heaped on O’Brien in his now socially transformed homeland.