WASHINGTON: Edna O’Brien, the renowned Irish author of book series including The Country Girls, has died. She was 93. reported People.
Her publisher, Faber Books, announced her death in a statement on X.
“It is with great sadness that Caroline Michel at PFD and Faber announce the death of beloved author Edna O’Brien,” the statement read. “She died peacefully on Saturday 27 July after a long illness. Our thoughts are with her family and friends, in particular her sons Marcus and Carlo. The family has requested privacy at this time.”
O’Brien, born in 1930 in County Clare, Ireland, achieved literary fame with her debut novel, The Country Girls, published in 1960. She also wrote sequels, The Lonely Girl and Girls in Their Married Bliss. The series follows the protagonists, Caithleen and Baba, as they grow up as schoolgirls, marry, and plan their futures.
Although The Country Girls saw great success in Britain and the United States after its release, it was banned in Ireland due to censorship rules and staunchly Catholic values in place at the time.
“I believe that mental disturbance by literature is a healthy and invigorating thing,” said O’Brien in 1965. “We have plenty of comfortable and easy prose all around us, but it’s by abrasion that people’s prejudices are aroused.”
Prior to her life as a writer, O’Brien began her career as a pharmacist in 1950, later marrying fellow writer Ernest Gebler and welcoming two sons with him. The pair divorced in 1964.
By 1959, she had moved to London with her family and began working for the publisher Hutchinson, according to The Guardian. Before long, the company had commissioned her to write her own novel.
O’Brien’s novels have received appreciation over the years for their feminist viewpoints and storylines about women living in a male-dominated society. Throughout her career, she wrote several novels, including The Little Red Chairs (2015), House of Splendid Isolation (1994), and Girls (2019). She wrote screenplays, plays, a memoir titled Country Girl, and biographies of James Joyce and Lord Byron, in addition to novels.
“I’ve fallen in and out of favour with feminists, because I do not write to formula or hold to a rigid political correctness. I couldn’t,” she said in a 2015 interview with her publisher, Faber, speaking about her status as a feminist writer. “But let me say this, I know that women have been treated appallingly down the ages.”
“I grew up in a patriarchal society and my first books, for all their comedy, are partly protest. I do not apologize to anyone for giving my women broken hearts, because it happens and it happens for men also,” she added. “If you write about feelings, then you have a vast and moving canvas to explore.”
Faber said in a statement that O’Brien was “one of the greatest writers of our age.”
“She revolutionised Irish literature, capturing the lives of women and the complexities of the human condition in prose that was luminous and spare, and which had a profound influence on so many writers who followed her,” the publisher added.
O’Brien was lauded by critics over the years, receiving the 2001 Irish PEN Lifetime Achievement Award, and in 2015, Irish President Michael D. Higgins awarded her the country’s highest literary award, the Saoi of Aosdana.
O’Brien is survived by her sons, Carlo Gebler and Sasha Gebler, according to People. (ANI)
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