Edna O’Brien, Irish literary giant who wrote ‘The Country Girls,’ dies at 93

NEW YORK — Edna O’Brien, Ireland’s literary pride and outlaw who scandalized her native land with her debut novel “The Country Girls” before gaining international acclaim as a storyteller and iconoclast that found her welcomed everywhere from Dublin to the White House, has died. She was 93.

O’Brien died Saturday after a long illness, according to a statement by her publisher Faber and the literary agency PFD.

“A defiant and courageous spirit, Edna constantly strove to break new artistic ground, to write truthfully, from a place of deep feeling,” Faber said in a statement. “The vitality of her prose was a mirror of her zest for life: she was the very best company, kind, generous, mischievous, brave.”

O’Brien published more than 20 books, most of them novels and story collections, and would know fully what she called the “extremities of joy and sorrow, love, crossed love and unrequited love, success and failure, fame and slaughter.” Few so concretely and poetically challenged Ireland’s taboos on religion, sex and gender. Few wrote so fiercely, so sensually about loneliness, rebellion, desire and persecution. A world traveler in mind and body, O’Brien was as likely to imagine the longings of an Irish nun as to take in a man’s “boyish smile” in the midst of a “ponderous London club.”

O’Brien was an unknown about to turn 30, living with her husband and two small children outside of London, when “The Country Girls” became one of Ireland’s most polarizing works of fiction in memory. Written in just three weeks and published in 1960, for an advance of roughly $75, “The Country Girls” follows the lives of two young women — Caithleen (Kate) Brady and Bridget (Baba) Brennan, who journey from a rural convent to the risks and adventures of Dublin. Admirers were as caught up in their defiance and awakening as would-be censors were enraged by such passages as “He opened his braces and let his trousers slip down around the ankles” and “He patted my knees with his other hand. I was excited and warm and violent.”

Fame, wanted or otherwise, was O’Brien’s ever after. Her novel was praised and purchased in London and New York; back in Ireland, it was labeled “filth” by Minister of Justice Charles Haughey and burned publicly in O’Brien’s hometown of Tuamgraney, County Clare. Detractors also included O’Brien’s parents and her husband, author Ernest Gebler, from whom O’Brien was already becoming estranged.

O’Brien would be recognized well beyond the world of books. The 1980s British band Dexy’s Midnight Runners named her alongside Eugene O’Neill, Samuel Beckett and Oscar Wilde among others in the literary tribute “Burn It Down.” She dined at the White House with then-first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton and actor Jack Nicholson and befriended Jacqueline Kennedy, whom she remembered as a “creature of paradoxes. While being private and immured she also had a hunger for intimacy — it was as if the barriers she had put up needed at times to be battered down.”

O’Brien’s other books included the novels “August Is a Wicked Month,” the story of a woman’s sexual liberation that was banned in parts of Ireland; “Down By The River,” based on a true story about a teenage Irish girl who becomes pregnant after being raped by her father; and the autobiographical “The Light of Evening,” in which a famous author returns to Ireland to see her ailing mother. Her most recent work, “Girl,” a novel about victims of Boko Haram, came out in 2019.

Josephine Edna O’Brien was one of four children raised on a farm where “the relics of riches remained. It was a life full of contradictions. We had an avenue, but it was full of potholes; there was a gatehouse, but another couple lived there.” Her father was a violent alcoholic, her mother a talented letter writer who disapproved of her daughter’s profession, quite likely out of jealousy.

By her early 20s, O’Brien was working in a pharmacy in Dublin and reading Tolstoy, Thackeray and O’Connor, among others, in her spare time. She had dreams of writing since sneaking out to the nearby fields as a child to work on stories, but doubted the relevance of her life until she read a biography of James Joyce and learned that “Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man” was autobiographical. She began writing fiction that ran in the literary magazine The Bell and found work reviewing manuscripts for the publishing house Hutchinson, where editors were impressed enough by her summaries to commission what became “The Country Girls.”

“I cried a lot writing ‘The Country Girls,’ but scarcely noticed the tears. Anyhow, they were good tears. They touched on feelings that I did not know I had. Before my eyes, infinitely clear, came that former world in which I believed our fields and hollows had some old music slumbering in them, centuries old,” she wrote in her memoir.

“The words poured out of me, and the pen above the paper was not moving fast enough, so that I sometimes feared they would be lost forever.”