On Tuesday, April 15th, Anita M. gave an engaging presentation on Irish writer Edna O’Brien. While Anita has a soft voice and a gentle manner, she doesn’t hesitate to tackle writers who have difficult, weighty, and often controversial stories to tell. Anita has presented on writers Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Susan Brownmiller, Rex Murphy, George Jonas, among others.
Edna O’Brien was born in 1930 and spent many of her adolescent years educated in an Irish boarding school run by Catholic sisters. O’Brien received no formal education in writing; however, she read and observed the style of “great writers,” such as Tolstoy and Thackeray. She was greatly influenced by James Joyce: both the writer and his works. In 1959, O’Brien moved to London with her husband. By this time, she had already developed a writing style “with wide variations adapted for various venues and topics.”
O’Brien’s six decades of writing produced twenty novels, non-fiction books, short-story collections, dramas, and children’s stories. She wrote mostly while living in London; yet, her ties and literary focus remained mainly in Ireland. In her later years, O’Brien kept her focus on women and girls though expanded to different parts of the world, such as in her final novel, Girl, which tells the story of the abducted schoolgirls in Nigeria. Anita states, “Injustices in Ireland and abroad are highlighted with writing sometimes considered too honest, too raw and too emotional. She wrote passionately about the plight of abused and compromised women and girls, female sexuality and redemption.”
The autobiographical novel The Country Girls (1960) is a frank portrayal of the stifled and silenced female experience in Ireland in the 1950s onward. While the story is published as a single book, it is also part of The Country Girls Trilogy that contains three novels and an epilogue: The Country Girls, The Lonely Girl (1962), and Girls in Their Married Bliss (1964). The novels centre on two Irish schoolgirls, Cait and Baba, who spend their teenage years in a convent school then leave for Dublin as young women. All three novels were banned by the Irish Censorship Board and purportedly burned for their sexually explicit content and their commentary on the Catholic Church and Irish society.
Anita also discussed James Joyce (1999), Country Girl: A Memoir (2012), The Little Red Chairs (2015), and Girl (2019). Anita read compelling excerpts from the novels, and Anna Q. joined Anita to read a passage from the biography James Joyce. From the chapter “Once Upon a Time,” O’Brien pokes fun at her literary inspiration calling him a “lecher” and a “Joyce of all trades.” While she has fun with the “bullock-befriending bard,” O’Brien’s biography illustrates her lifelong admiration and deep connection to the much-celebrated, Irish writer.
Upon Dame Edna O’Brien’s passing in 2024, Irish President Michael Higgins expressed his great sorrow at the passing of “one of the outstanding writers in modern time.”
Posted by Mooréa G.