Edna O’Brien, groundbreaking Irish novelist, dies at 93 (2024)

The book poured out of her in three weeks, and Ms. O’Brien seemed to have emerged from nowhere fully formed as a writer, producing lyrical prose whose tone and detail perfectly captured her characters’ inner lives and desires and presaged the sexual revolution.

Literary scholars today view “The Country Girls” as deeply influential. “By turns beautiful and bawdy, funny and haunting, ‘The Country Girls,’ often referred to as the quintessential tale of Irish girlhood, is not the novel that broke the mould: it is the one that made it,” Irish novelist Eimear McBride observed.

The novel, released before Ms. O’Brien turned 30, received critical accolades in Britain and the United States but was banned in Ireland. Her mother, who claimed that a local priest had publicly burned the book, kept a copy but redacted the passages she found devilish, the author recalled, “with good, deep, black ink.”

Ms. O’Brien seemed resigned to, even bemused by, the pariah status her early books conferred on her back home in County Clare.

“I believe that mental disturbance by literature is a healthy and invigorating thing,” Ms. O’Brien told the British newspaper the Guardian in 1965. “We have plenty of comfortable and easy prose all around us, but it’s by abrasion that people’s prejudices are aroused.”

Ms. O’Brien grew up in a newly independent and staunchly Catholic Ireland with firm ideas about the roles of women, who had no lawful access to abortion, contraception or divorce. In much of her work, Ms. O’Brien limned characters who yearned to break free of “the stranglehold I grew up with” but who often fell victim to their desires and dreams.

She took pains to say her work, which included plays, screenplays and short stories, was not strictly autobiographical — she wrote a 2012 memoir titled “Country Girl” — but if she needed inspiration for her tales, her life would have been a gold mine.

She quested for romance, but her relationships did not last. In her late 70s, she told a BBC radio interviewer: “I don’t think I have ever learned the game of men and women. To this day I regret the fact that it’s like a dance I couldn’t learn.”

After a failed love affair in the 1980s, she returned to the one relationship that would abide — with the written word — and she was still turning out handwritten manuscripts in her late 80s.

Like her hero James Joyce, she chose to write about Ireland from self-exile. She spent most of her life in London, and, young and famous, did her bit to define the Swinging Sixties and drag the decade into the Sagging Seventies. She bought a big house in London’s bohemian Chelsea neighborhood, where she held legendary gatherings.

Her party guests included Princess Margaret, Jane Fonda and Sean Connery. She was friends with former first lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and author Gore Vidal. She never denied rumors of a fling with the Hollywood star Robert Mitchum.

One night, actor Marlon Brando, the worse for drink, slept in her kitchen. Paul McCartney once drove her home and sang a lullaby to her children.

Ms. O’Brien was an ageless Celtic beauty, a point not lost on a procession of feature writers who described her as auburn-haired and milky-skinned, with soulful gray-blue eyes.

Robert Gottlieb, Ms. O’Brien’s longtime editor at Alfred A. Knopf in New York, wrote that she “was a glory … with her pale white skin, spectacular red hair, and exotic outfits: ankle-length gossamer skirts, vivid antique-lace blouses, and layers of baubles, bangles, and beads. She dangled and wafted.”

In time, she came to fear that this image would overshadow her work. “I don’t want to be remembered as this lightweight who gave parties and had love affairs. It is ridiculous,” she wrote. “I have written more than 25 books.”

Ms. O’Brien returned time and again to themes of pain and isolation in star-crossed protagonists, but her canvas broadened in mid- to late career as she explored political strife, including violence in Ireland, the Balkans and Nigeria.

Maureen O’Connor, a professor of English at University College Cork and an authority on Ms. O’Brien, described the author’s books as “pellucid, sane, and honest, while at the same time devastatingly lyrical, always vivid.”

In an email, O’Connor added that the “rich variety of her voice is one of its distinctive qualities, something that has emerged especially powerfully in her late work, in which the narrative speaks through characters young, old, male, female, across the classes, and of many nationalities.”

Josephine Edna O’Brien was born in Tuamgraney, County Clare, on Dec. 15, 1930, and was the youngest of four children. Her father, a horse trader, gambled and drank away much of his inherited fortune, and she and her mother lived in fear of his alcoholic furies.

Her heightened imagination was stirred by the pageant of life in East Clare, including troupes of itinerant actors that passed through her village, and she attempted a first novel at 10.

The next year, she left home to attend a Catholic boarding school in County Galway. At first, with naive aplomb, Ms. O’Brien wanted to become not just a nun but a saint. The calling passed. As for her writing talent, the nuns “hated it,” she said.

She went to Dublin at 18 and trained as a pharmacist. She fell in love with an Irish writer of Czech descent named Ernest Gebler, who had just divorced. They eventually eloped. She said she was “duty-bound” to marry him after a posse consisting of her father, her brothers and a bishop followed them to the Isle of Man. By then, though being chased, she was not chaste. Gebler “had been roughed up a little bit,” she told an interviewer.

In the 1950s, the couple had two sons and lived in County Wicklow before settling in London. But it was not a happy marriage, Ms. O’Brien said, and it worsened when “The Country Girls” brought her success that sparked his jealousy. She walked out and spent two years in a bitter custody battle.

After “The Country Girls” she wrote two sequels, “The Lonely Girl” (1962) and “Girls in Their Married Bliss” (1964), tracing the marriages and divorces of her protagonists, Baba and Caithleen. These titles were also banned in Ireland, along with her next four novels.

Her female protagonists sought to navigate misogyny and their own passions, and they often foundered. In Ms. O’Brien’s universe, liberation comes with a price. An early critic likened her lovelorn protagonists to lemmings in search of a cliff.

In “August Is a Wicked Month,” published in 1965, a woman estranged from her husband seeks pleasure on the French Riviera. She contracts a venereal disease and loses her son in an accident. The book was used as evidence against her, unsuccessfully, in her divorce and child-custody case.

Ms. O’Brien also wrote the screenplay to “Girl With Green Eyes” (1964), based on “The Lonely Girl,” and “X, Y & Zee” (1972), starring Elizabeth Taylor and Michael Caine as a couple whose marriage has become a sadomasoch*stic combat zone.

In the 1980s, she stopped writing for several years while she had a long, unfulfilling affair with an unnamed British political figure she called “Lochinvar” in her memoir. “I had fooled myself, living on emotional crumbs,” she wrote. Her finances fell into disarray, and she had to sell her grand home in Chelsea.

“I was a little foolish to myself,” she said on the BBC radio show “Desert Island Discs.” “It was a lesson to me never to let a day pass that I didn’t keep with my vocation.”

In her late 80s, Ms. O’Brien traveled to Nigeria for research on her book “Girl,” a novel based on the kidnapping and sexual abuse of schoolgirls by Boko Haram jihadists. Shortly after its 2019 publication, she was awarded the David Cohen Prize for Literature, which recognizes the lifetime achievement of British and Irish writers.

Mark Lawson, a judge on the Cohen Prize panel, wrote that Ms. O’Brien “achieved a rare arc of brilliant consistency, her literary skill, courage, and impact as apparent in a novel published as recently as September as in her first book, which appeared 60 years ago.”

She had two sons, Carlo Gebler and Sasha Gebler. A complete list of survivors was not immediately available.

Ms. O’Brien had a vacation home designed by her architect son Sasha on the picturesque Irish coast near Donegal, but she sold it, saying the rooms were too large and sunny for writing. She also said she feared that if she returned to Ireland permanently the intensity of her Irishness would fade, to the detriment of her work. She never lost her brogue, which seemed to become stronger if more wistful as she aged.

“I wish in my early life I had stood up a bit more,” Ms. O’Brien told the Financial Times in an interview at the age of 86. “But all things considered I was pretty brave. You know, if you start off with a pretty terrifying start, you have many handicaps. … I would say, as regards my inner self, I am happier than I ever was while naturally aware of death and decay and decrepitude. I am full of darkness, but I am also full of light. Do you know what I mean?”