Background
Edna O'Brien was born in 1930 at Tuamgraney, County Clare, Ireland, a place she would later describe as "fervid" and "enclosed". According to O'Brien, her mother was a strong, controlling woman who had emigrated temporarily to America.
novelist playwright memoirist poet
Edna O'Brien was born in 1930 at Tuamgraney, County Clare, Ireland, a place she would later describe as "fervid" and "enclosed". According to O'Brien, her mother was a strong, controlling woman who had emigrated temporarily to America.
From 1941 to 1946 she was educated by the Sisters of Mercy – a circumstance that contributed to a "suffocating" childhood.
O’Brien’s popular first novel, The Country Girls (1960), was the first volume of The Country Girls Trilogy. It had as its main characters two Irish girls who leave their strict homes and convent school for the excitement and romantic opportunities of Dublin. The girls’ subsequent lives are traced in The Lonely Girl (1962) and Girls in Their Married Bliss (1964), by which time both have settled in London and have become disillusioned with marriage and men in general. Among O’Brien’s many subsequent novels are August Is a Wicked Month (1965), Casualties of Peace (1966), Night (1972), Johnny I Hardly Knew You (1977; U. S. title I Hardly Knew You), The High Road (1988), House of Splendid Isolation (1994), Down by the River (1996), In the Forest (2002), and The Light of Evening (2006). The Little Red Chairs (2015) was widely praised for its acutely observed characterization of an Irish villager who has an ill-fated affair with a war criminal in hiding.
O’Brien’s novels express her despair over the condition of women in contemporary society and, in particular, attack women’s repressive upbringing. Her heroines search unsuccessfully for fulfillment in relationships with men, typically engaging in doomed love trysts as a remedy for their loneliness and emotional isolation. The bleak tone of O’Brien’s novels is, however, broken by flights of lyrical description and by the heroines’ attainment of brief periods of happiness.
Collections of O’Brien’s short stories appeared as The Love Object (1968), A Scandalous Woman and Other Stories (1974), A Fanatic Heart (1984), Lantern Slides (1990), and Saints and Sinners (2011). She also wrote plays, screenplays for film and television, and nonfiction about Ireland. In 1999 her short study James Joyce was published to critical acclaim. She chronicled the frenetic passions of Lord Byron in Byron in Love (2009). Country Girl, O’Brien’s 2012 memoir, traced her passage from the repressive confinement of the rural Irish town where she was raised to the rarefied existence afforded by her success as a novelist.
O'Brien was the youngest child of "a strict, religious family".
Quotes from others about the person
According to Scottish novelist Andrew O'Hagan: "She changed the nature of Irish fiction; she brought the woman's experience and sex and internal lives of those people on to the page, and she did it with style, and she made those concerns international. "
In 1954, she married, against her parents' wishes, the Irish writer Ernest Gébler and the couple moved to London. They had two sons, Carlo (a writer) and Sasha Gebler, an architect, but the marriage was dissolved in 1964. Gébler died in 1998.