Originally Published in Print, December 2021.
Last December, Edna O’Brien reached her ninetieth birthday as the undisputed grande dame of Irish literature. The Irish Times ran a piece full of fellow Irish writers doffing the cap. In O’Brien’s adopted home across the Irish Sea, The Guardian proclaimed her “Ireland’s greatest living writer”. Photographer Mandy O’Neill’s new portrait of O’Brien was unveiled at the National Gallery of Ireland. O’Brien herself marked the occasion by delivering the 2020 T. S. Eliot Lecture in conjunction with the Abbey Theatre.
Such unanimity of adulation in her later years can obscure the uneasiness with which the literary and scholarly establishment has often received O’Brien. Fame followed hot on the heels of her 1960 début The Country Girls, but O’Brien’s path to literary respectability has been a bumpier affair.
The prohibition of her early work in Ireland was undoubtedly personally challenging for O’Brien, but hardly hampered her writing career. The ban on Country Girls meant O’Brien joined the ranks of many of the leading lights of Irish literature: “the best banned in the land” as Brendan Behan put it. However, the frank treatment of female sexuality that got her in trouble with the censors would go on to have a curiously double-sided effect on her reception as a writer. On one hand, the fact that a young female writer would dare to write such “scandalous” things brought a certain sensational, erotic frisson to O’Brien’s work. On the other, it was dismissed as lightweight, covering material more often found in frothy romance novels. O’Brien’s flair for the melodramatic only encouraged the cynics.
This mixture of intrigue and dismissal combined curiously with O’Brien’s national identity. Her Irishness, for many interviewers and critics, granted her a titillating exoticism. Journalists commented on her wit, her red hair and green eyes, her “soft, sweet Irish brogue” — and her physical attractiveness. An image emerged of O’Brien as the wild Irish girl, the bold, rakish colleen, a “smashing red-haired Irish beauty”.
While this slightly disreputable image boosted her profile, it was not conducive to serious engagement with her work. As early as 1967, critic Seán McMahon commented that O’Brien shared with Behan the “dubious fame” of being better known for her persona than her writing. Perhaps nothing better represents this confusion of O’Brien the persona and O’Brien the author than the frequency with which her own image appeared on the covers of her books. She gazes wistfully from an early 1960s paperback of The Country Girls; she defiantly puffs a cigarette on August is a Wicked Month (1965); she smiles knowingly on The Love Object (1968). The appeal of the O’Brien persona (and O’Brien’s own willingness, at times, to play into it) has attracted no small amount of sneering from her detractors.
However, with the decades has come an increasing appreciation of how O’Brien’s work bravely shed light on aspects of life that were previously confined to the dark — particularly aspects of the lives of Irish women. When President Michael D. Higgins inducted her as a Saoi of Aos Dána in 2015, he praised her as a “fearless teller of truth”. This welcome refocusing on the merits of O’Brien’s work is surely due to many things, such as O’Brien’s creative longevity and more enlightened ideas regarding female writing (one would hope).
More pessimistically, one might wonder if the simple fact of O’Brien’s age has allowed her to escape the kind of dismissal still faced by young female writers. As novelist Elif Shafak commented in a 2019 article in The Atlantic on “the gender seriousness gap”: “In a patriarchy, a woman writer will be respected only when she is ‘old’ in the eyes of the society, only when she is defeminized, desexualized”.
Yet as late as 2018, critic Sinéad Mooney wrote that “[i]t is, in fact, difficult to think of another major Irish writer whose work still provokes so much unease, whose reputation is so unsettled and unsettling.” Ian Parker’s 2019 New Yorker profile of O’Brien proved Mooney’s point. This oddly suspicious piece questioned the personal and professional hardships faced by O’Brien and slyly scorned the way in which she has crafted her public persona. It was a striking example of the cynicism that has dogged O’Brien, all the more striking for its recency.
Perhaps the main change since the 1960s and 1970s, then, is not that O’Brien causes less controversy, but that she has more supporters willing to take on the naysayers. In the wake of Parker’s controversial profile, she was defended in articles in The Irish Times and the Dublin Review of Books: a marked improvement on excoriation from the pulpit. For better or worse, O’Brien’s power to provoke debate remains undimmed.
