Edna O'Brien, Ireland's literary pride and outlaw who scandalized her native land with her debut novel The Country Girls before gaining international acclaim as a storyteller and iconoclast that found her welcomed from Dublin to the White House, has died. She was 93. A statement by her publisher Faber and the literary agency PFD said O'Brien died Saturday after a long illness, the AP reports. Calling O'Brien "a defiant and courageous spirit," Faber said in a statement that "the vitality of her prose was a mirror of her zest for life: she was the very best company, kind, generous, mischievous, brave."
O'Brien published more than 20 books, most of them novels and story collections, and would know fully what she called the "extremities of joy and sorrow, love, crossed love and unrequited love, success and failure, fame and slaughter." Few so concretely and poetically challenged Ireland's religious, sexual and gender boundaries. Few wrote so fiercely, so sensually about loneliness, rebellion, desire, and persecution. "O'Brien is attracted to taboos just as they break, to the place of greatest heat and darkness and, you might even say, danger to her mortal soul," Booker Prize winner Anne Enright wrote in the Guardian in 2012. A world traveler in mind and body, O'Brien was as likely to imagine the longings of an Irish nun as to take in a man's "boyish smile" in the midst of a "ponderous London club."
She befriended movie stars and heads of states while writing sympathetically about Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams and meeting with women farmworkers in Nigeria who feared abduction by Boko Haram. O'Brien was an unknown living with her husband and two small children outside London when The Country Girls made her Ireland's most notorious exile since James Joyce. Written in three weeks and published in 1960, The Country Girls follows two young women, Caithleen (Kate) Brady and Bridget (Baba) Brennan, from a rural convent to the adventures of Dublin. Admirers were as caught up in their defiance and awakening as would-be censors were enraged by such passages as "He opened his braces and let his trousers slip down around the ankles," and "He patted my knees with his other hand. I was excited and warm and violent."
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Fame, wanted or otherwise, was O'Brien's ever after. Her novel was praised and purchased in London and New York while back in Ireland it was labeled "filth" by the minister of justice and burned publicly in O'Brien's hometown of Tuamgraney, County Clare. Detractors included O'Brien's parents and her husband, author Ernest Gebler, from whom O'Brien was already becoming estranged. She continued the stories of Kate and Baba in The Lonely Girl and Girls in Their Married Bliss. She said people in Ireland were courteous to her face "but slanderous behind her back," per the Irish Times. Her treatment there changed as younger Irish writers embraced O'Brien's work. "I am seen as a genteel romantic writer," she once said. "But the reality is I am a savage writer with a savage eye. I write about the things we are not supposed to speak about."
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