Little known facts about best-selling author Edna O’Brien

20th January 2020

Josephine Edna O’Brien was born in Tuamgraney, County Clare, on December 15, 1930. She later described her birthplace as ‘fervid’ and ‘enclosed’.

Her mother Lena was a strong, controlling woman and Edna endured a suffocating childhood, at home and, from 1941 to 1946, whilst being educated by the Sisters of Mercy. She rebelled against the coercive and stifling religion into which she was immersed, and called it ‘very frightening and all pervasive.’

In 1950 Edna was awarded a licence as a pharmacist but was accumulating a passion for literature, reading Tolstoy, Thackeray, F. Scott Fitzgerald and James Joyce. Understanding that ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’ was autobiographical made her realise she wanted to write herself. Moving to London she started work as a reader for Hutchison, where she was commissioned to write a novel for £50. ‘The Country Girls’ was published in 1960, and her stellar literary career was underway.

The Country Girls Trilogy, including ‘The Lonely Girl’ (1962) and ‘Girls in Their Married Bliss’ (1964) were banned, and sometimes burned, in Ireland. The portrayal of the sex lives of some of O’Brien’s characters was too frank for many in her native land, and the writer was accused of ‘corrupting the minds of young women.’ Her own parents remained strongly opposed to anything related to literature, and her mother disapproved of Edna’s career as a writer.

O’Brien was a panel member on the first edition of Question Time in 1979, and is now its sole surviving member.

In 1980, she wrote a play – ‘Virginia’ – about Virginia Woolf, staged originally in Ontario and then in London’s West End, with Maggie Smith as Woolf. She has written other plays and biographical works, as well as short stories and poetry, but it is her nineteen novels that have garnered most awards and assured her a place in the most esteemed literary annals. She was appointed a Dame of the Order of the British Empire in 2018.

In 1954, against her parents’ wishes, Edna met and married the Irish writer Ernest Gébler. They moved to London, had two sons – Carlo and Sasha – but the marriage was dissolved in 1964. He told her: ‘You can write and I will never forgive you’.

In August 2019, during an interview with the Observer, she professed a love of football and the TV series ‘Chernobyl’, said she has a lovely grave waiting for her on a holy island on the River Shannon and that she ‘wants to go out as someone who spoke the truth.’

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