Edna O’Brien Dies: Author Who Gave Voice To Irish Women Was 93
deadline.comEdna O’Brien, whose books were initially banned in Ireland but gained international acclaim, died Saturday after a long illness.
She was 93 and her death was confirmed by her publisher, Faber, and the literary agency PFD. “A defiant and courageous spirit, Edna constantly strove to break new artistic ground, to write truthfully, from a place of deep feeling,” Faber said in a statement. “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 that challenged Ireland’s religious, sexual, and gender boundaries by tackling issues of 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 of her in the Guardian in 2012.
O’Brien was an unknown about to turn 30, living with her husband and two small children outside of London, when her novel The Country Girls bowed.
Written in just three weeks and published in 1960 for an advance of roughly $75, The Country Girls follows the lives of two young women who go from a rural convent to the risks and adventures of Dublin.
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