Edna O’Brien obituary: flamboyant, fearless, and outspoken Irish writer (2024)

Born: December 15th, 1930;

Died: July 27th, 2024

The Irish-born, London-based novelist, short-story writer, playwright and screenwriter, Edna O’Brien has died aged 93. A flamboyant, fearless, outspoken and often controversial figure, O’Brien wrote more than 20 novels, biographies of James Joyce and Lord Byron as well as plays, screenplays and a memoir.

Her debut trilogy of novels – The Country Girls (1960), The Lonely Girl [later renamed Girl with Green Eyes] (1962) and Girls in Their Married Bliss (1963) – were famously banned by the Irish censorship board, making them even more sought after by Irish readers. And more than 50 years later in 2019, the trilogy was widely celebrated as Dublin’s One City One Book.

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Edna O’Brien obituary: flamboyant, fearless, and outspoken Irish writer

Her other early novels were August is a Wicked Month (1965), A Scandalous Woman (1974) and Johnny I Hardly Knew You (1977). Her later novels include House of Splendid Isolation (1994), Down by the River (1996), In the Forest (2002), The Light of the Evening (2006), The Little Red Chairs (2015) and Girl (2019). O’Brien’s short story collections include Mrs Reinhardt and Other Stories (1978) A Fanatic Heart (1984) and Saints and Sinners (2011). She also adapted her novel, A Pagan Place (1972) for the stage play as well as writing other plays, Our Father (1999) and Haunted (2009). Her version of Euripides’ Iphigenia was staged in 2003.

Assiduous and hard-working, O’Brien also wrote screenplays (I Was Happy Here in 1965 and Zee and Co, 1972) as well as the screenplay for her novel, Girl with the Green Eyes (1964). She also tried her hand at acting, appearing in the television thriller, The Hard Way (1979), with Patrick McGoohan and Lee Van Cleef. And she appeared as herself in the television series, The Life and Loves of a She-Devil (1986). Her memoir, Country Girl was published in 2012.

[Irish author Edna O’Brien has died aged 93Opens in new window]

Throughout her long life, O’Brien had a well-publicised love-hate relationship with her native country. In Ireland, she said, people were courteous to her face, but slanderous behind her back. But, in the last two decades or so, this relationship changed as younger Irish writers began to view her as the Grand Dame of Irish literature rather than the red-headed rebel from County Clare. She was also very well regarded by many North American writers including Philip Roth and Alice Munro.

O’Brien was the recipient of many awards in her early writing career and latterly. These include the Pen Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature in 2018 and the David Cohen prize for Literature (sometimes described as the Nobel in literature for these islands) in 2019. One of the judges of the Cohen prize described her as “a pivotal figure in the modernisation of Ireland”. Another said that “her writing moved between the political and the personal and lyrical like nobody else currently working today in Britain and Ireland”.

Deemed to be ahead of her time in how she raised difficult issues in her writing, she was sometimes subjected to personal attacks by critics and commentators

In 2018, she also won the Presidential Distinguished Service award for the Irish abroad and she was appointed a Dame of the British Empire for her services to literature. O’Brien received a Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2012 Irish Book Awards and she was named Commander of the French “Ordre des Arts et Lettres” in 2021. Earlier prizes include the Kingsley Amis Award (1962), the Los Angeles Times Book Prize (1990) and the European Prize for Literature (1995).

O’Brien was conferred with honorary doctorates by Galway University, Queen’s University Belfast and the University of Limerick. In 2006 University College Dublin awarded her the Ulysses Medal, the highest prize the university can bestow. She was also a member of Aosdána and was elected as a Saoi (wise one) in 2015.

Deemed to be ahead of her time in how she raised difficult issues in her writing, she was sometimes subjected to personal attacks by critics and commentators. The profile by New Yorker writer, Ian Parker in 2019 was one such case which prompted two female academics to write articles in defence of O’Brien.

Many of her novels were inspired by real events and real people. For example, her 1994, her novel, In The Forest (2002) was closely based on the murders in 1994 of a young mother, her infant son and a priest near to the writer’s hometown of Tuamgraney in Co Clare. At the time, critics accused her of exploiting the tragedy for personal gain and upsetting the families involved by writing an intrusive and insensitive book. A television documentary, made by O’Brien to coincide with the book’s publication, added to the controversy. She depicted the murdered mother as a mirror image of herself – red-haired, quick-tempered, with a “scandalous” reputation and, quoting Yeats, “too much beauty for luck”. She went on to compare her own loss of youth with the young woman’s violent death.

Her novel, Down by the River was inspired by the famous Irish X case, an underage rape victim who sought an abortion in England. And the main character in House of Splendid Isolation is based on Dominic McGlinchy, the former leader of the Irish National Liberation Army who she visited in Long Kesh prison as part of her research for the novel.

The House of Splendid Isolation was described by one critic as an important example of a “Troubles” novel by a woman writer. Throughout the 1990s, O’Brien followed the Northern Ireland peace negotiations and at one point wrote an open letter to the then British prime minister, Tony Blair, arguing for Gerry Adams to be included in political dialogue. Her book, Girl is a novel about the Boko Haram kidnapping of Nigerian school girls which she travelled to Nigeria to research when in her eighties.

O’Brien once said, “I am seen as a genteel romantic writer. But the reality is I am a savage writer with a savage eye. I write about the things we are not supposed to speak about.”

‘A theatre unto herself, at the same time fierce and vulnerable, serious and flamboyant, proud and self-deprecating, weary and enthusiastic’

— Lara Marlowe

Her novel, The Light of Evening (2006), was based on her mother’s early life. The author’s fictional self appears as the daughter, Eleanora, a glamorous red-headed writer who makes an unfortunate marriage to a dominating, foreign and much older man – a familiar figure to her readers. Although not self-pitying, she did speak publicly about her alcoholic father, her own troubled marriage and rearing her sons as a single mother in London.

At the age of 92, O’Brien wrote the play, Joyce’s Women, which was shown at the Abbey Theatre as part of the Dublin Theatre Festival. In an interview with The Irish Times at the time, she said that she learned more from Joyce than anyone else in the world. “No other writer has taught me what Joyce taught me which is to get to the pure, to the thing that hurts, to the thing that moves,” she said.

In the aforementioned Irish Times interview, Lara Marlowe described her as “a theatre unto herself, at the same time fierce and vulnerable, serious and flamboyant, proud and self-deprecating, weary and enthusiastic.”

[Carlo Gébler on his mother Edna O’Brien: Coming to the endOpens in new window]

Born in Tuamgraney, Co. Clare, the youngest child of Michael O’Brien and Lena Cleary, Edna O’Brien grew up in Drewsboro, a large house set in 242 hectares (600 acres). She completed her secondary school education as a boarder at Convent of Mercy, Loughrea, Co. Galway. She moved to Dublin to work in a chemist while studying at night to become pharmacist. However, she always wanted to be a writer and in 1948 she began writing for the Irish Press.

In 1952, she met the writer, Ernest Gébler, 20 years her senior. When her family disapproved of the relationship, the couple moved to England and married in 1954. They returned to Ireland to live with their two sons, Karl (later Carlo) and Sasha (now known as Marcus) at Lake Park House overlooking Lough Dan in County Wicklow. They later lived in Dublin for a time. Gebler and O’Brien separated in 1964 and divorced in 1968.

O’Brien subsequently moved to London with her two sons where her Chelsea home became a magnet for the literati and glitterati. Her guests at that time included Marlon Brando, Richard Burton, Jane Fonda, Paul McCarthy, VS Naipaul, Jackie Onassis, Vanessa Redgrave, JD Salinger and others. Her flamboyant lifestyle led Vanity Fair to dub her as “The Playgirl of the Western World”.

However, like her famous hero, James Joyce, she did not manage money well. She stopped writing for 10 years and lost her house. In the 1990s, she rented a smaller house in Knightsbridge where she lived for most of the rest of her life.

Although considered by some critics to have a sense of sameness about her plots, O’Brien was applauded for her realistic dialogue, realistic situations and realistic female characters. Her facility with language and character drew comparisons with Virginia Woolf, Dylan Thomas and James Joyce. Philip Roth described her as a consummate stylist, “the most gifted woman now writing fiction in English”.

The late Irish Times literary correspondent, Eileen Battersby described her as a natural writer whose writing was “too honest, too angry, too raw and uncomfortable on occasion in its excess, extremes and lyric melodrama” and yet ahead of its time.

Edna O’Brien obituary: flamboyant, fearless, and outspoken Irish writer (5)

She proudly supported the Irish republican cause. In 1972 she led a march in protest at the jailing of then IRA leader Seán Mac Stiofáin. In the New York Times in 1994 she wrote in praise of Gerry Adams, who, “given a different incarnation”, could have been “one of those monks transcribing the Gospels into Gaelic.” In 2006 she contributed a poem to a book marking the 25th anniversary of the H-Blocks hunger strikes.

She was fully aware that opinion was divided as to whether she was a great character or a colourful self-invention. One journalist likened an interview with her to “trying to share a fervid scene in a play with the leading lady, who has also written the script”.

In 2021, O’Brien donated 50 boxes of manuscripts of her notebooks, drafts, revisions and correspondence from 2009 to 2021 to the National Library to be added to the earlier donation of materials from 2000-2009. In 2000, Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia acquired the author’s archive of papers from 1939-2000. Her portrait by Mandy O’Neill hangs in the National Gallery of Ireland.

Her sons Carlo and Marcus survive her.

Edna O’Brien obituary: flamboyant, fearless, and outspoken Irish writer (2024)

FAQs

Edna O’Brien obituary: flamboyant, fearless, and outspoken Irish writer? ›

'Fearless' Irish author Edna O'Brien dies aged 93

What age is Edna O'Brien? ›

Acclaimed Irish writer Edna O'Brien has died at the age of 93. Ms O'Brien died yesterday in London after a long illness. She was a leading light for a generation of Irish writers, and her loss will have a profound impact on the Irish literary scene.

Who was Edna O'Brien married to? ›

O'Brien began to produce sketches and tales during childhood. Raised in a small town in western Ireland, she received a strict Irish Catholic convent education and went on to study pharmacy in Dublin, where she received a license in 1950. In 1952 she married the novelist Ernest Gebler, with whom she had two sons.

Where did Edna O'Brien live? ›

Who was the Irish writer born in 1932? ›

Christy Brown (born June 5, 1932, Dublin, Irish Free State [now in Ireland]—died September 7, 1981, Parbrook, Somerset, England) was an Irish writer who overcame virtually total paralysis to become a successful novelist and poet.

Does Edna have a kid? ›

Etienne & Raoul Pontellier

Etienne and Raoul are Edna and Léonce's two sons. They are four and five years old, respectively.

How tall was Edna? ›

Edna is a short woman with short black hair and bangs, brown eyes, a bulbous nose and round glasses. She is about 4'3" tall.

What awards did Edna O Brien win? ›

Her honors did include an Irish Book Award for lifetime achievement, the PEN/Nabokov prize and the Frank O'Connor award in 2011 for her story collection “Saints and Sinners,” for which she was praised by poet and award judge Thomas McCarthy as “the one who kept speaking when everyone else stopped talking about being an ...

What was Edna O'Brien's first novel? ›

By the time I read Edna O'Brien's debut novel The Country Girls for the first time, I was in my early twenties and it was no longer so shocking. When it was published in 1960, it was banned in Ireland, but not before a priest in Limerick had burned copies after the rosary.

What is the first name of the Irish novelist O'Brien? ›

Josephine Edna O'Brien DBE (15 December 1930 – 27 July 2024) was an Irish novelist, memoirist, playwright, poet and short story writer. Elected to Aosdána by her fellow artists, she was honoured with the title Saoi in 2015 and the biennial David Cohen Prize in 2019.

Where does Edna live? ›

Edna is the protagonist in The Awakening. She is married to a wealthy and high-class man named Leonce Pontellier, and they live in New Orleans with their two young sons. Her father is referred to in the novel as the Colonel, and Edna has two sisters—Margaret and Janet.

Where was O Brien raised? ›

Award-winning author Tim O'Brien is best known for his fictional portrayals of the Vietnam conflict. He was born in 1946 in Austin, Minn., and spent most of his youth in the small town of Worthington, Minn.

Where does O Brien live in 1984? ›

Answer and Explanation: From Chapter 8 of the book, we find O'Brien lives in a lavish living quarters. In 1984, O'Brien is a member of the Inner-Party. He lives in an entirely different part of town from both the Outer-Party members and the Proles.

Who is the controversial Irish writer? ›

Irish writer Edna O'Brien died Saturday at the age of 93 after a long illness. O'Brien sparked controversy in Ireland for the way she wrote about women's lives and relationships, as NPR's Isabella Gomez Sarmiento reports.

What are three famous Irish writers? ›

Famous Irish Writers and Literary Ireland
  • James Joyce. Literary Ireland cannot even take shape without James Joyce. ...
  • WB Yeats. In 1923, Yeats won a Nobel Peace Prize. ...
  • Oscar Wilde. ...
  • Frank McCourt. ...
  • Johnathan Swift. ...
  • Oliver St.

Which Irish writer was nominated for Nobel Prize? ›

Nominees
NomineeBornYears Nominated
Samuel Beckett13 April 1906 in Foxrock, Dublin Ireland1968
1969
Elizabeth Bowen7 June 1899 in Dublin, Ireland1958
Austin Clarke9 May 1896 in Stoneybatter, Dublin, Ireland1972
43 more rows

How old is O Brien in 1984? ›

O'Brien is estimated privately by Winston as being 48–50 years old (O'Brien notices and guesses that Winston is contemplating this despite him not speaking of it).

When was Edna Ferber born? ›

Edna Ferber (born August 15, 1885, Kalamazoo, Michigan, U.S.—died April 16, 1968, New York, New York) was an American novelist and short-story writer who wrote with compassion and curiosity about Midwestern American life. Born: August 15, 1885, Kalamazoo, Michigan, U.S.

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