Edna O’Brien, a pioneering Irish novelist who was her own unique water sorcerer

“W“When I was a child in Ireland, a spring would suddenly appear and produce buckets of clear, beautiful water, and then, just as suddenly, it would dry up. The dowsers would come with their rods and sometimes another spring would be discovered. You have to be your own dowser.”

In six decades of writing about love, loss and Ireland, Edna O’Brien was her own unique water-stirrer. In terms of the beautiful nature-based metaphor she used in a famous Paris Review interview, his prose was an inexhaustible source: clear, deeply felt and often very funny.

However, his first novel Country Girls met with a very virulent reception when it was first published in 1960. The book was immediately banned in its home country; copies were burned in public; and she began receiving the first of a long series of unpleasant anonymous letters.

His response was to write two sequels in quick succession, The lonely girl (1962) and Girls in their marital bliss (1964). All the novels in the trilogy speak with a new and clear frankness about domestic violence, religious hypocrisy, female friendship, defiance of convention, and the inner lives of young Irish women. All the novels were quickly banned in Ireland.

The bans did not prevent Edna O’Brien from charting a new course. Her lyrical prose, intensity of feeling and frankness had a major impact on the writers who followed her. For Anne Enright, O’Brien was “the great, the sole survivor of the forces that have silenced and destroyed who knows how many other Irish women writers.”

We can see how far Irish society has come: last month, after Edna O’Brien died at the age of 94, Irish President Michael Higgins paid tribute to her work for “the moral courage she has shown in confronting Irish society with realities that have long been ignored and repressed.”

Ireland as a theme

Ireland was the great theme of O’Brien’s life. As an exile who had lived in London for most of her life, she nevertheless chose to be buried in Ireland, in her native village. In an interview about her archive, she explained her intense relationship with her country of birth: “First of all, I am Irish. I was born in Ireland. My remains will go to Ireland. When I was a child and when I was a child, Ireland fed me with imagination and emotion.”

Josephine Edna O’Brien was born in 1930 into a devout farming family in the Irish village of Tuamgraney, County Clare. It was a strange and repressive childhood in a strange and repressive time, which she would later describe with words like “devout,” “withdrawn,” “bigoted,” and “stifling.” Her father drank, gambled, and was profligate with his land and possessions. Her mother had worked as a domestic in Brooklyn. They were an oddly matched couple. It was not a home that supported her love of reading; her mother had once found a Sean O’Casey novel and wanted to burn it. It was in this troubled soil that O’Brien’s imagination was nourished. She responded with resilience: “Unhappy homes are a very good incubator for stories.”

As a young girl, O’Brien attended a convent run by Irish Catholic nuns, studied pharmacy, and worked as a pharmacist in Dublin. Paris Review In an interview, she speaks wryly of this period of her life. “There was a kind of Irish literary scene, but I wasn’t part of it. One reason was poverty, another was that I didn’t have an entry; I was just a chemistry student in a bedsit. I had to apprentice myself.” Dublin is also a place where country girls escape. Cait buys herself black stockings, after reading that they are “literary.” Baba, who knows the world well, also advises Cait to be more sensible: “Stop asking guys if they’ve read James Joyce’s Dubliners. They’re not interested. They’re out for the night.”

O’Brien’s life in Dublin was fast-paced. In her early twenties, she met and married a much older writer, Ernest Gebler. They moved to London, had two sons, and settled in a suburb. Within weeks of arriving in London, she wrote Country Girls. As she began to experience literary success, Gebler became jealous. Their imaginations were not in harmony. The marriage broke up.

Complicated reactions

O’Brien’s critical reception was complicated. Ireland was very wary of the act of writing, especially when the themes dealt with were childhood and the secret lives of families. Many men of letters rejected O’Brien’s work; some feminists rejected it. She was criticized for going too far, but also for not going far enough. Some critics considered her a superficial socialite. She shrugged: “You can’t write all these books, raise children, earn a living, and live a gilded life.”

She kept writing. Spring was clear and true. “When you’re young, you have boundless energy: you run the house, you look after the children, and you write about your despair.” She wrote about other writers: Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Byron. She wrote plays, screenplays, and children’s books. She wrote about Irish trauma: as in By the river, where a teenage rape victim desperately tries to get an abortion. She interviewed Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams for The New York Times. His latest work, Girltells the story of a young Nigerian girl who is kidnapped by terrorists. At the age of 80, she traveled to Nigeria to research the book. But she already knew something about what it was like to grow up as a girl in a repressive and stifling environment. The novel begins on a powerful and unforgettable note: “I was a girl once, but not anymore.”

In O’Brien’s work, women struggle to express themselves. Sometimes they struggle to survive. They emerge, wounded but undefeated.

Uma Mahadevan Dasgupta is a part of IAS.