Edna O’Brien was a brave and acutely perceptive writer on romantic pain

The life of a writer is solitary. There is no substitute for hours sitting alone putting words on a page. In his tribute to Edna O’Brien, who died this weekend aged 93, her son Carlo Gébler describes watching his mother compose in her looping handwriting, mouthing her words to herself as she put them down.

That is not the Edna O’Brien that the rest of the world got to see. Away from her desk she loved to socialize, always in a discriminating way. As in her books, she was acutely perceptive but able in life to put aside that sliver of ice in the soul that all great novelists need. She was kind and considerate to many of the thousands of people she came across, especially those younger than her. 

I first met Edna at a summer house party some forty years ago. At breakfast, someone reported that one of us twenty year olds was out of sorts that morning. “What’s wrong with her?”, someone else, perhaps me, asked gauchly. “The usual”, Edna sighed gently.

“The usual” – the pain that affairs of the heart brings into our lives, and most particularly what men, the dominant sex, may do to women – was the great theme running through her art in a seventy year long career, which ran from rural Ireland through the swinging sixties and on into her later, more overtly political, novels.

Her first lot of breakthrough, best-selling, novels drew directly on her “suffocating” experience as a girl growing up in Roman Catholic County Clare before escaping to Dublin and into what promised to be a bohemian marriage. 

The Country Girls, The Lonely Girl (subsequently called The Girl with Green Eyes), and Girls in their Married Bliss chronicle a similar path to that followed by their author all the way to a vicious divorce, which leaves her heroine with the choice of losing her two young children or becoming a precarious single parent. 

These books were banned in Ireland, condemned as blasphemy, and shunned by her parents. Looking back, they also played their part in the transformation of Edna’s native country, as Ireland’s President stressed in his tribute to her this week. 

Michael D Higgins said she was “a fearless teller of truths” and “a superb writer possessed of the moral courage to confront Irish society with realities long ignored and suppressed”. 

Higgins added: “Through that deeply insightful work, rich in humanity, Edna O’Brien was one of the first writers to provide a true voice to the experiences of women in Ireland in their different generations and played an important role in transforming the status of women across Irish society.” 

Edna left Ireland with her husband Ernst, an Irish writer of Czech descent who was some fifteen years her senior. By 1964, their marriage was failing in large part because Gébler was jealous of her success and felt that he should receive the credit for it. 

Gébler returned to Ireland. Edna would be based in England for the rest of her life, while travelling widely. She maintained her links to Ireland, her soft Irish accent and her Irish citizenship, which meant she became an honorary Dame when awarded the DBE in 2018. 

Through the 1960s and 70s, Edna managed a regular output of work drawing on her past in Ireland and on the fashionable milieu in which she now found herself. She moved out of the suburbia which Ernst had chosen and into Chelsea, the epicentre of Swinging London. 

Edna was a beautiful woman and she became a star increasingly in demand as her writing spread to the cinema and television. Her circle of friends extended from Paul McCartney to Richard Burton and Marlon Brando, and to holidaying with the film director John Huston at his villa in Mexico. 

This period of her creativity is perhaps best captured by a glitzy 1972 movie she scripted called X, Y & Zee, sometimes known as Zee & Co. The cast for this tale of a love triangle was made up of big stars including Elizabeth Taylor, Michael Caine and Susannah York. 

Though set in London in September 1970, according to Roger Lewis in his recent book, Erotic Vagrancy, “we are also, I surmise, as far as O’Brien’s inspiration went, in Rome several crucial years earlier, for X, Y & Zee is an examination of Burton and Taylor’s marital and courtship shenanigans”. 

Lewis claims Edna was annoyed when the producers ducked out of the ending she had scripted: “Their three bodies – arms, heads, torso, all meeting for a consummation.” Some critics wrote off the film as “vulgar”, others felt Taylor had turned in one of her best performances.

By 1977, Edna the writer seemed exhausted by the pace of her life. She did not publish another novel for a decade – while continuing to be a much talked about public figure. She suffered from depression, self-treated in part with academic study of literature, her lifelong passion. 

Her first few books after the break were not well-received. She remained undaunted. With 1994’s House of Splendid Isolation, she began to develop her late style in which she set her theme of men overbearing women against real contemporary events. Controversy centred around an Irish republican character in the book, and O’Brien’s own journalistic encounters with real Republicans including Gerry Adams and Dominic McGlinchy.  Opinion in Ireland was further ruffled by several more novels drawing on painful and lurid real life news stories. 

The Light of The Evening, in 2006, returned to old territory as it dealt with a downtrodden rural Irish woman, trying to make up with her daughter, a writer. But in her last two books, Edna, by now approaching her ninetieth birthday, went global with her feminism and her research.

Some hailed The Little Red Chairs as her best book yet. It draws on the Balkan wars following the break-up of post-Soviet Yugoslavia and a war criminal in hiding, based on Radovan Karadzic. Here again, according to the New Yorker’s review, Edna explores “how women are punished for their sins, or suffer for their innocence”.

This theme is the core of her last published novel, Girl, inspired by the plight of schoolgirls abducted and sexually exploited by groups such as Boko Haram. Edna visited Nigeria several times and pressed Médecins sans Frontiers for details on the atrocities inflicted on kidnapped women. 

Ireland may have changed but Edna knew there were still lots of women around the globe suffering from “the usual”. She was indomitable, striking, elegant and eloquent, and compassionate to the end.

Write to us with your comments to be considered for publication at letters@reaction.life