‘The Country Girls’ Author Dies at 93

The esteemed Irish author Edna O’Brien has died aged 93 after a long illness.

O’Brien’s oeuvre of work, which spanned more than half a century, saw her explore the myriad complications and contradictions that colour women’s lives. Her early works were marred with controversy, with her debut novel, The Country Girls, banned in her home country of Ireland. However, O’Brien was lauded among wider literary circles – Philip Roth once hailed her as “the most gifted woman now writing fiction in English”.

In 2017, O’Brien wrote an essay for Harper Bazaar’s December issue in which she reflects on her career and the significance of The Country Girls.

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Reading, or even glancing, at an early work is like looking at a school photo and can be unsettling. Samuel Beckett, once he began writing plays, dismissed his fiction as “that awful prose” that he had been writing for years. If ever there was a human being who did not suffer from self-aggrandisement, it was Mr Beckett.

I had occasion to re-read The Country Girls last year, as I was doing a loose adaptation of a drama, which was performed at Chichester Festival in June. A newcomer, fresh from Lamda, called Grace Moloney, infused magic into the part of Kate. What struck me on re-reading the book was not its yearning or elegiac quality, as has often been said, but rather its wildness. These girls are hungry for adventure and repent, if ever they do with scalding ribaldry, at leisure! I also realised that when writing it I had no idea what I was doing. It wrote itself, as I have often said. My education was scant. I did not have access to many books, but the two authors that I read intensely, copying out whole paragraphs of their prose, were James Joyce, as author of Dubliners and Chekhov’s stories, especially The Steppe.

So on re-reading I searched for the person I once was. How much of me was there and how much had changed. A lot. But I saw that I still had a leaning towards foolishness, that I would never quite be immune to the subtle thraldom of a Mr Gentleman and that I love nature, although determinedly I live in cities. I still love trees and roses of all descriptions and that particular shuffle that birds make as they roost at evening time. The fabric of my childhood. But of course, it was not always as lyrical as that. There were storms that scalped the trees, there were howling winds that ran around our house in forewarning, there was chronic shortage of money and there were rows, all the ingredients, as Virginia Woolf once remarked, for the making of a writer.

It is a mystery, even to those who do it, where writing comes from. It is also a mystery and a matter for disputation for family members who cannot but see writers as cuckoos in the nest. TS Eliot traced this writing gene more tellingly than anyone else. He called it “the dark embryo”.

I look back on The Country Girls as a little leap, from helplessness to a sort of burgeoning independence. I had been attempting to write for many years and wrote some fairly flowery newspaper articles that centred either on nature or domestic matters. Only exile broke the timidity. Only exile allowed the words to originate and to crystallise, only exile gave the feelings free rein. I was able to write it in three weeks, dimly guessing that such fluency might not happen again. Browning’s lines are not for mortals:

That’s the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over,
Lest you think he never could recapture
The first fine careless rapture!

At the time of writing I was dispirited. I had moved to England and found it alien, the marriage that I had tumbled into I was unable to tumble out of. I had two children. We lived in bleak suburbia and yet, by some alchemy, I was able to summon up a lost world. I could hear donkeys braying their lamentations and my mother’s cough when she lay down at night. I could feel the brown rosary beads that we both worked with our hands, the quicker to complete it and have the reward of a boiled sweet. I was inebriated with memory. I smile now when people talk to me of the possibility of a book launch. There was none in May 1960, only shenanigans.

The book was banned in Ireland, as indeed many authors’ books were, but I was singled out on account of being a girl, and a “hussy”, who had wrought “a smear on Irish womanhood”, something that had previously been attributed to JM Synge, for The Playboy of the Western World. All this was nothing to the impending heart attacks and nervous breakdowns among the faithful in my village. My mother relayed this doom to me, while also expressing her distaste, saying, “paper never refused ink”.

My poor mother, who had shown me such love, was convinced that by writing The Country Girls my eternal soul was lost. Frank O’Connor added salt to the wound by giving it a scathing review in The New York Times, although I had to concede that he was probably prescient in noting that I had bad taste in men. Things were redeemed somewhat when an extract appeared in this magazine, and Kingsley Amis gave it his first novel award of the year, at the Christmas round-up.

In 60 years of writing I have read some far-fetched things about myself, such as a life of jet-setting and that I drank gin for breakfast when I had actually said ginseng. I have also had my share of scorn and insult. Not too long ago I learned that it would be a relief to readers if I were to leave Ireland alone and in a different paper I was likened to a “tired fiddler in an old Dublin pub”.

I have been accused of marinating in victimhood and suffering. I did not invent suffering. I merely observed it. It has also been said that I write the same book over and over again, and to some extent there is truth in that. Girls and women have been my primary theme, their hardships yes, their relegation yes, but ultimately, their paramount strength. It is perhaps no accident that the novel I am now writing is called Girl. The geography very different, the narrative more barbaric, but the terrors of the cliff-face remain with me. It concerns a young girl who has escaped from Boko Haram captivity (the fate of many) and is found dazed and wandering in Sambisa Forest. A daunting task, or to borrow from the Paul Simon song, “Still Crazy After All These Years”.

Source: Harper Bazaar