One of the greatest writers to emerge from post-Independence Ireland, Edna O’Brien, died 27 July 2024 at the age of 93. In the last decade of her life, she accumulated some of the highest honours a writer can receive, including the David Cohen Prize (referred to as the UK / Ireland Nobel Prize for Literature; 2019), the PEN American Lifetime Achievement Award (2018), and France’s highest arts honour, the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (2021). She was also made a Dame of the Order of the British Empire for her contributions to literature (2017). Had she died even twenty-five years earlier, the opening sentence of this tribute would have seemed ludicrous to most influential voices in “official” Ireland. It is only since the turn of this century that O’Brien started to be appreciated in her own country, largely thanks to the efforts of the Irish Studies community of scholars, who began to take her writing seriously as a subject of critical inquiry in the mid-1990s.

O’Brien was born Josephine Edna O’Brien in Tuamgraney / Scariff in County Clare, 15 December 1930. It has often been observed that, despite growing up in a grand house, Drewsboro, built in more prosperous times before her birth, O’Brien’s early years in this remote, rural place in the early decades of the newly independent nation were materially and intellectually impoverished. While it is important to note that O’Brien rose to the heights of success and international fame that she did without coming from privilege, without family connections, and without a third-level education, it is just as important to acknowledge the overlooked riches of her upbringing. She often spoke of her profound connection to the landscape of her childhood, her especially intense relationship with trees. Growing up with ready access to the natural world was a signal source of inspiration for young Edna and is an often-underestimated privilege when considering the development of artistic sensibilities. It has become unusual for professional writers not to have a university education, but this has not always been the case, and the curriculum and standards for second-level education in Ireland in the middle decades of the twentieth century would rival those of many current Humanities MA programmes on the island. O’Brien attended a highly regarded secondary school in Galway, the Convent of Mercy in Loughrea, where she excelled, particularly in writing. And, perhaps most significant, despite the lack of books in Drewsboro, an intimate source of artistic stimulation resided there. O’Brien’s mother Lena, who, however much she may have disapproved of her daughter’s work, was a gifted writer herself, as demonstrated in the near-daily correspondence between mother and daughter archived in Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. O’Brien’s meticulous attention to detail, her ability to vividly recreate the simple realities of everyday life owe a great deal to her mother’s example.

O’Brien began writing and publishing in the late 1940s (sometimes using the pseudonym “Dina Bryan”), years before the appearance of the sensational 1960 novel that launched her lifelong career, The Country Girls. The book received universally positive reviews in the English-speaking world, including in Ireland, but that response began to curdle in her homeland within months of its appearance, once its themes and contents came to the attention of government and church authorities. The book, which represented the reality of the lives of rural women and girls in mid-century Ireland with a bracing honesty that reveals joys as well as deprivations and cruelties, was quickly censored by state authorities, as were the next five novels O’Brien published. O’Brien, who relocated to England with her husband in 1958, felt rejected by her family and her beloved home country, a pain she carried to the end of her life, despite the fact that literary awards, cultural honours, and glowing book reviews became typical of Irish reception of and reaction to her work in recent decades.

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Maureen O’Connor, Edna O’Brien and the Art of Fiction. Bucknell University Press, 2021.

Eminent writers in North America have been O’Brien’s friends and champions for decades, and her work has been translated into over twenty-five languages. O’Brien’s significance, her unique contribution to contemporary literature was recognized from the first by her readers around the world. She has also always had loyal fans in Ireland who kept reading through the controversies and periodic condemnations, which dogged her career up until the 2002 novel In the Forest, seen as scandalously exploiting the tragedy of the real-life murders on which the narrative was based, a criticism some scholars have insightfully characterized as gendered. In the Forest was the last of four state-of-the-nation novels, all of which featured some element the Irish media took exception to, claiming the writer to be out of touch with modern Ireland. It has since been admitted by some of these same people that throughout her career O’Brien was bravely addressing some of the most shameful facets of post-Independence Irish culture, such as clerical child sex abuse and the incarceration of women in Magdalen laundries and “mother and baby” homes, before state authorities began to engage with this history in any meaningful way. As deeply unhappy as such treatment by Irish critics had made her, she was never discouraged and never stopped writing until the last year of her life, when she was working on a biography of T.S. Eliot, having been invited to deliver the annual T.S. Eliot lecture in 2020 on her 90^th birthday while suffering from the cancer that would eventually end her life.

O’Brien’s death was reported as major news around the world, and her carefully curated funeral, which she planned for many years, was covered by all Irish media. It was carried live on RTÉ television online and featured an exceptional eulogy by her long-time friend, Scottish novelist Andrew O’Hagan, delivered to an overflow crowd in Tuamgraney Church. In addition to family, luminaries from the world of politics and entertainment who numbered amongst her many friends, such as Irish President Michael D. Higgins and actor Stephen Rea, were in attendance. She arranged to be buried with her mother’s family on Holy Island (Inis Cealtra) in Lough Derg. It was an appropriately dramatic and gorgeous event, culminating with a final journey in a wooden rowboat across the lake to be buried under a dazzlingly sunny sky. Highlights from the beautiful ceremony can be found online, including at this Irish Times link: ‘Edna was exceptional’: Edna O’Brien laid to rest on Holy Island.

That O’Brien lived to see the remarkable change in Irish attitudes towards her and her writing is to be celebrated, but, as revealed in a recent documentary on the writer’s work and life, Blue Road: The Edna O’Brien Story, directed by Sinéad O’Shea, the wound of that initial mistreatment never fully healed. The documentary was released in Irish cinemas in January after having made the rounds of international film festivals in 2024. It won the Best New Irish Feature award at the Cork International Film Festival in November. (That RTÉ turned down an application for funding for the documentary is a late and ironic example of Ireland’s history of undervaluing its native daughter.) The film features previously unpublished excerpts from her private diaries and her last live interviews, in which the writer is as erect, elegant, and powerful as ever, despite appearing startlingly fragile. The depth of this fragility becomes apparent in a poignant moment when the interviewer asks if O’Brien’s years of therapy did anything to assuage the effects of her childhood traumas. The writer clutches her throat in one of her signature gestures and repeatedly whispers a rasping, haunted “no.” That such pain and fear persisted to her last days offers further testimony of the remarkable resilience of this brave, unrelenting voice that has been dedicated to witnessing and reporting the joys and sorrows of the voiceless, whether that is young, naïve girls in rural Ireland, neglected, lonely housewives in the suburbs of London, incarcerated young men, Serbian victims of torture, or Nigerian women and girls kidnapped by Boko Haram in Nigeria. O’Brien answered every challenge and criticism with the genius and beauty of her prose, the bottomless depths of her powers of sympathy.