President Michael D. Higgins has led tributes to Irish literary giant Edna O’Brien, who has passed away at the age of 93.
The novelist, who penned more than 20 books, including her groundbreaking The Country Girls, died 'peacefully' on Saturday in London following a long illness.
Her literary agent, PFD, and publisher, Faber, confirmed the news, stating: 'Our thoughts are with her family and friends, in particular her sons Marcus and Carlo. The family has requested privacy at this time.'
In tribute, President Higgins said she was 'a fearless teller of truths', and 'a superb writer possessed of the moral courage to confront Irish society with realities long ignored and suppressed'.
He went on: 'Through that deeply insightful work, rich in humanity, Edna O’Brien was one of the first writers to provide a true voice to the experiences of women in Ireland in their different generations and played an important role in transforming the status of women across Irish society.
'While the beauty of her work was immediately recognized abroad, it is important to remember the hostile reaction it provoked among those who wished for the lived experience of women to remain far from the world of Irish literature, with her books shamefully banned upon their early publication.'
President Higgins added that Ms. O’Brien’s work is now respected throughout the world. Ms. O’Brien's works often revolve around the inner feelings of women, and their problems in relating to men, and to society as a whole.
Her first novel, The Country Girls, from 1960, became a global success and is often credited with breaking the taboo on sexual matters and social issues during a period in Ireland when they were not discussed.
Her publisher Faber described Ms. O’Brien as 'one of the greatest writers of our age'.
'She revolutionized Irish literature, capturing the lives of women and the complexities of the human condition in prose that was luminous and spare, and which had a profound influence on so many writers who followed her. A defiant and courageous spirit, Edna constantly strove to break new artistic ground, to write truthfully, from a place of deep feeling.
'The vitality of her prose was a mirror of her zest for life: she was the very best company, kind, generous, mischievous, brave. Edna was a dear friend to us all, and we will miss her dreadfully. It is Faber’s huge privilege to publish her, and her bold and brilliant body of work lives on,' it said.
A world traveler in mind and body, Ms. 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’.
Ms. O’Brien, from Co. Clare, was the friend of movie stars and heads of state while also writing sympathetically about Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams and meeting with female farm workers in Nigeria who feared abduction by Boko Haram, an Islamist jihadist organization.
She also mentored the young, with the Edna O’Brien Young Writers Bursary that nurtured and inspired a new generation of writers.
Before 30, Ms. O’Brien was living with her husband and two small children outside London, when The Country Girls made her Ireland’s most notorious exile since James Joyce.
Written in three weeks and published in 1960, for an advance of $75, The Country Girls follows the lives of two young women: Caithleen (Kate) Brady and Bridget (Baba) Brennan journey from a rural convent to the adventures of Dublin.
Admirers were as caught up in their awakening as would-be censors were enraged by such passages as: 'He patted my knees with his other hand. I was excited and warm and violent.'
Her novel was praised and purchased in London and New York while back in Ireland it was labeled ‘filth’ by then Minister for Justice Charles Haughey and burned publicly in Ms. O’Brien’s hometown of Tuamgraney.
Detractors also included Ms. O’Brien’s parents and her husband, the author Ernest Gebler, from whom Ms. O’Brien was already becoming estranged.
'I had left the spare copy on the hall table for my husband to read, should he wish, and one morning he surprised me by appearing quite early in the doorway of the kitchen, the manuscript in his hand,' she wrote in her memoir Country Girl, from 2012. 'Yes, he had to concede that despite everything, I had done it, and then he said something that was the death knell of the already ailing marriage, "You can write and I will never forgive you".'
She continued the stories of Kate and Baba in The Lonely Girl and Girls in Their Married Bliss and by the mid-1960s was single and enjoying the prime of 'Swinging London', whether socializing with Princess Margaret and Marianne Faithfull, or having a fling with actor Robert Mitchum.
One night, she was escorted home by Paul McCartney, who picked up her son’s guitar and improvised the lines about Ms. O’Brien: 'She’ll have you sighing/She’ll have you crying/Hey/She’ll blow your mind away'.
Fellow author Anne Enright would call Ms. O’Brien 'the first Irish woman ever to have sex. For some decades, indeed, she was the only Irish woman to have had sex – the rest just had children'.
Ms. O’Brien was honored with an Irish Book Award for lifetime achievement, the PEN/Nabokov prize and the Frank O’Connor award in 2011 for Saints and Sinners, for which she was praised by Thomas McCarthy as ‘the one who kept speaking when everyone else stopped talking about being an Irishwoman’.
More photos below.
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