zShe was a fragile, almost frail figure, who throughout her life looked considerably younger than the age stated on her passport. Elegant, pleasant, chic. But behind this appearance hid a provocative and combative personality. She remained like that all her life. In recent decades, Edna O’Brien had the status of great old lady of Irish literature. But she never became a pleasant old lady. She died on Sunday at the age of 93.
Edna O’Brien was born on December 15, 1930, in the village of Tuamgraney in County Clare, Ireland, a small, introverted community that she found oppressive and stifling from an early age. That feeling of oppression began at home. In her memoirs, she would call her habitually drunken father a dangerous figure. Her mother, very present and in control, gave Edna little room to breathe, she felt.
About the Author
Hans Bouman prescribe from Volkskrant about books and focuses primarily on literature and authors from the English language area.
The difficult mother-daughter relationship would become a recurring motif in her novels and short stories. The same can be said of O’Brien’s troubled relationship with the Roman Catholic Church.
O’Brien received his secondary education at the Sisters of Mercy convent school in Loughrea, where he attended boarding school. There he developed not so much a strong aversion to the Catholic faith itself, but rather to the daily practices of the church. Which did not prevent him from falling in love with one of the nuns.
Ernest Gebler
After leaving school, O’Brien studied pharmacy in Dublin. In the pharmacy where she worked she met the much older writer Ernest Gébler and fell in love. This caused a major conflict with her family, from which O’Brien escaped by marrying Gébler and abandoning her studies. The couple initially lived in rural Ireland, where they had their sons Carlo (who would also become a writer) and Sasha.
In the late 1950s they moved to London, where O’Brien made her first contacts with the literary world. She began reading manuscripts for Hutchinson’s publishing house and was carefully asked if she would like to write a novel herself. After attending a lecture on Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, O’Brien was so inspired by the latter’s compact, lucid prose that within a few weeks she was writing a novel. The country girls (1960) wrote.
In this novel she told the story of two girls who flee the stifling narrow-mindedness of rural western Ireland to seek refuge in the depraved big cities of Dublin and London. In particular, O’Brien’s open writing about sex and her merciless portrayal of life in the Irish countryside aroused intense indignation in her homeland.
Book burning
The book was banned in Ireland, as were the six subsequent ones written by O’Brien. He was thus in the company of his inspiration, Hemingway, and authors such as William Faulkner, Samuel Beckett, Frank O’Connor and Seán Ó Faoláin.
During Sunday mass, the priest of his hometown asked if there were any parishioners there. The country girls had in the house. Shortly afterwards, the priest demonstratively burned all the copies in the village square.
The book and its sequels. The lonely girl and The girls in their marital bliss were a huge success in England, but had no beneficial effect on O’Brien’s marriage. Gébler, an author immediately overtaken in fame by his wife, found it difficult to cope with the new situation. Mounting tensions eventually led to O’Brien storming out of the house one day while she was cooking, never to return.
Love and friendships
She moved from the London suburb she had always hated to trendy Chelsea and made the most of the freedoms of the 1960s. Lovers came and went; she never remarried. Between writing and loving, O’Brien maintained friendships with celebrities such as Marlon Brando, Richard Burton, Jacqueline Onassis and Harold Wilson.
Paul McCartney reportedly sometimes came to sing them to sleep. To complete the story, he took LSD in the company of Samuel Beckett and entered therapy with anti-psychiatrist RD Laing.
Even as a “liberated woman” and celebrated author, O’Brien remained faithful to the subject matter that interested her. Novels such as August is an evil month (1965), Johnny, I barely knew you. (1977) and Road (1988) offer compelling portraits of women and their fierce but futile struggle to find emotional satisfaction and happiness.
Later work
The questionable role of the Catholic Church returns, among other things, A pagan place (1970) and Down river (1996). That O’Brien remained inspired by the difficult mother-daughter relationships until the end is a testament The light of the afternoon (2006) and Saints and sinners (2011).
Down river It is also formed together with House of splendid isolation (1994) and Wild Decembers (1999) a trilogy on political issues, including Irish terrorism; also a subject on which the writer had her own idiosyncratic views.
At the age of 81, Edna O’Brien published, with style, her lively and provocative memoirs under the revealing title Country girl (2012) At heart, she remained a village girl all her life, continuing to fight vigorously for her place in the big, hostile outside world until her last breath.
