Edna O'Brien

Edna O'Brien wrote The Country Girls, which was banned and burned in Ireland, and spent sixty years writing about the country that had done it. She was born in County Clare, trained as a pharmacist, and moved to London, where she wrote her first novel in three weeks in 1960. It follows two girls from a convent school in the west of Ireland to Dublin and describes their sexual lives plainly, which was enough: the Censorship of Publications Board banned it, her parish priest burned copies, and her own mother inked out words in her copy. The two sequels were banned as well. The Irish state's censorship regime of that period, backed by the constitutional settlement of 1937 with its special position for the Catholic Church and its article on women's life within the home, is the exact machinery she ran into. She kept writing: Girl with Green Eyes, A Pagan Place, and later books on the Troubles and on the Magdalene system, and in her eighties a novel about a girl abducted by Boko Haram, researched in Nigeria. Ireland's attitude to her reversed completely; she was made a Saoi of Aosdana, the highest honour the country gives an artist. She died in 2024, and the bans had been lifted for decades. Philip Roth called her the most gifted woman writing in English. She was received back by Ireland completely enough that her funeral was a national occasion. Her later work moved a long way from the Country Girls, and she resented being read forever through a book she wrote at twenty-nine in three weeks.

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