Dame Edna O’Brien, acclaimed writer whose early novels caused outrage in her native Ireland

Her needle-sharp evocations of Irish life and manners, her sexual candour – and her vivid eye for detail – made her a literary star

Edna O’Brien, who has died aged 93, burst on to the literary scene in 1960 with her debut novel, The Country Girls, the first of three semi-autobiographical books which follow the fortunes of two unlikely friends, bookish, sensitive Caithleen Brady, and the brazen Baba Brennan.
The Country Girls deals with their girlhood years – the discovery of their freedom – and men – as they leave their Irish village and convent boarding school and set out for a new life in Dublin. British reviewers were charmed by the book’s youthful quality and its “enchantingly casual” ribaldry. In Ireland, however, it caused outrage, though, as a personality, Edna O’Brien was a celebrity in her home country from the early 1960s.
The book was banned by the Censorship Board and in some places – so it was said – burnt. The postmistress in Edna O’Brien’s home town of Tuamgraney, County Clare, held that the author of such filth should be kicked naked through the streets. Many years later, the writer discovered that her own mother had hidden her copy with the offending words blotted out in black ink.
With her following two novels, The Lonely Girl and Girls in their Married Bliss, Edna O’Brien confirmed her reputation as a writer who revelled in life’s absurdities. Love and the lot of young women in an unforgiving world became her dominant themes, and her views on sex were much quoted.
“The explorer in woman is as deep and as true as in man”, she once said. “Woman’s longing to stray is more persistent because man’s possibilities are so much wider. … Man is able to mollify his restlessness with other activities, hunting, shooting, fishing. With women it is all poured into the sexual aspect”.
Edna O’Brien was author of more than three dozen books (and six plays), ranging from the Country Girls trilogy of the 1960s to a 2009 biography of Byron, and Girl (2019), a much bleaker novel that retells the story of the schoolgirls kidnapped in Nigeria by Boko Haram. Many reviewers, however, thought that she found her true voice as writer of simple, deftly-comic short stories which provided detached, but needle-sharp glimpses of Irish life and manners that had the air of Joyce’s Dubliners.
Like Joyce, Edna O’Brien had to exile herself to find her true identity as a writer. She spent most of her life in England where she developed from innocent Irish convent girl to glamorous international literary star. Yet in spirit she never really left her native Ireland, her Roman Catholic upbringing also evident in the incantatory rhythms of her prose.
Edna O’Brien was concerned with the full spectrum of female experience and her subjects ranged from freethinking, sensual young women who dare to break society’s conventions, to “craven” (to use one of her favourite words) women who do not dare to make the leap and, later on, in novels such as The Little Red Chairs (2015), inspired by the war crimes in Bosnia, and Girl, about female victims of male violence.
In Country Girl, a memoir of her own life published in 2012, Edna O’Brien depicted herself as a woman of “two sides”, bold and enterprising on the one hand, and sensitive and vulnerable on the other, “drawn into the wild heart of things” yet hesitant and fearful of the consequences. It was this sense of human frailty – and her extraordinarily vivid eye for detail – that made both her and her writing so alluring.
The youngest of four children, Edna O’Brien was born on December 15 1930 from peasant stock on her mother’s side and landowners on her father’s. There had been family money, thanks to a cure-all elixir, Father John’s Medicine, invented by a priestly relative, although her father had drunk and gambled it away by the time Edna was born. 
She grew up in a house called Drewsboro, in Co Clare, built from the ruin of the one-time family seat which had been burnt down 10 years before she was born to stop it from falling into the hands of the English militia.
Although she became a great beauty in later life, Edna claimed that she had been such an ugly child that “when Ger McNamara, the son of the couple who lived in our gate lodge and a captain in the Irish army, came to congratulate her, my mother said I was too unsightly to be shown and therefore kept me hidden under the red herringbone quilt.”
Edna’s mother was pious even by the standards of Irish Catholicism. “There were morning prayers, evening prayers, vespers, supplications and contritions, psalms and versicals,” Edna recalled. “There were exhortations about pride, vanity, filthy pleasures, the deformity of our sins being so very great that they could not be fully comprehended by human understanding. The flames of Hell seemed as real as the turf burning in the fire.”
Her father, however, posed a more immediate threat to her safety. On one occasion, accusing his wife of hiding money, he waved a revolver in the face of his wife and child, vowing “havoc and slaughter on all of us and on families along the road who had refused him drink”. When Edna’s mother pleaded with him to drop the gun, he fired it instead.
“Crouched down next to her,” Edna recalled, “I thought that we were dead and found it strange to be smothered in burning smoke. The bullet missed us and passed into the frame of the door, where white paint was crumbling and falling off in little shards.”
Edna sought refuge in language, escaping to the fields to write: “The words ran away with me. I would write imaginary stories, stories set in our bog and our kitchen garden.” A precocious child, she recalled that when an inspector came to visit the convent where she was educated and she was asked if she took a great interest in Jesus, she expressed her disappointment that He “had been so curt with his mother at the Feast of Cana, when, worried about the scarcity of wine, he said, ‘It is not my business or thine’.”
After leaving school Edna moved to Dublin to train as a pharmacist, frequenting the city’s bookstores in her spare time. During one of these expeditions she found a “a slim volume entitled Introducing James Joyce, by TS Eliot , from which “a sentence shot up at me: ‘All blessed themselves and Mr Dedalus with a sigh of pleasure lifted from the dish the heavy cover pearled around the edge with glistening drops.’” Joyce’s evocation of an Ireland she knew so well opened her eyes to the possibility of expressing herself as a writer.
 It was from behind the counter of a chemist’s shop that she met Ernest Gebler, a failed Irish-Czech writer (“handsome beyond words, sallow-faced, with dark brown eyes and granite features”) who happened to be married. Six weeks later she moved in with him, a fact of which her mother was apprised one day when, emerging from Mass, she found an anonymous letter on the saddle of her bicycle informing her of her daughter’s “transgressions”.
In response, Edna’s father, assisted by a Cistercian abbot, arrived at Gebler’s house determined to take Edna home and “put her away”. The couple fled to the Isle of Man where they took refuge with the writer JP Donleavy, only for her father and his henchmen to follow in a private plane. 
Donleavy broke up the ensuing brawl and, once the plane was safely on its way back to Dublin, Gebler wrote a letter to her parents, “an ugly letter, unsparing of them in every way”, which she signed. Once the “impediments to marriage were overcome” the couple married and settled in the suburbs of London, where they raised two young sons.
But Edna O’Brien soon realised that she had exchanged the restrictions of her religious upbringing for an equally harsh domestic regime. Gebler become jealous, controlling and obsessed with his bowel movements. Galled to find that his wife was a much greater literary talent than he was, he established a regime even fiercer than the one she escaped.
Things reached a crisis on the publication of Country Girls (which she wrote in three weeks and for which she was paid £50), when Gebler scowled at her: “You can write and I will never forgive you.” 
Some time after Edna walked out on the marriage a “dossier” arrived – “An obituary, charting our relationship from the day Ernest had lifted me from behind the Dublin shop counter, thinking he had procured a decent companion but instead had found a ‘vainglorious monster, divested of all human traits.’” It took her three years to gain custody of their two sons.
She then reinvented herself as the hostess of swinging 1960s parties in which glamorous literary figures mingled with A-list musicians and film stars. With money received for the film script of Zee and Co, she bought a house in Carlyle Square where Paul McCartney tucked her son up in bed, Samuel Beckett and Laurence Olivier sang round her piano and Kenneth Tynan brought Princess Margaret, and was furious when Edna did not curtsy. Richard Burton tried to seduce her. He did not succeed, but Robert Mitchum did.
On her many visits to New York, where she taught creative writing, her ­circle expanded to take in Jackie ­Kennedy, Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal and RD Laing, with whom she went on a spectacularly bad acid trip, described in her novel, Time and Tide (1993).
The story of Edna O’Brien’s feud with her parents, her exile from Ireland and her emergence as a writer became infinitely more titillating to the newspapers because of the many photographs of her that accompanied the accounts. Her high cheekbones, elegant neck and luxuriant, flame-coloured hair, added to a potent combination that made her irresistible.
Yet Edna O’Brien never bought the hype and remained as dispassionately observant about the flashy, complacent world of London and New York as about her homeland. But Ireland, “a land of shame, a land of murder and a land of strange sacrificial women”, remained her touchstone and the animus against her in the Republic, which banned her first seven novels, remained strong for many years. 
When she returned to County Clare on a brief visit, her father threw her out of the house, shouting, “You little shite … always were from the first moment you were born … and always will be.”
Philip Roth once wrote of the “wounded vigour” in Edna O’Brien’s prose and it was hardly surprising that she was subject to anxieties and depression. These led her to seek help from quack doctors, including a self-acclaimed expert on the subject of the human libido who insisted on nudity for massages, “where he pressed his being on the various chakras for added intensity and panted more than was reasonable”.
She always had a weakness for unsuitable men, once describing her ideal date as “to go out with the man I love, who bought me champagne, who didn’t complain about the price … and didn’t tell me how much he loved his wife”. 
A long affair with an unnamed “prominent British politician” during the Eighties played havoc with her writing and in middle age she took an overdose of sleeping pills in a half-hearted attempt at suicide, from which she was “saved” by a letter from her son Sasha, pushed under the door.
Edna O’Brien lived long enough to turn from outcast to icon in her native Ireland, winning the Irish PEN lifetime achievement award in 2001. She enjoyed the irony when in 2007 a plaque in her honour was unveiled near the entrance to her old home in by an officiating priest. “Unlike the time when I was considered something of a Jezebel because of my books,” she recalled, “now from the altar the priest spoke of the honour that it was to have me back.”
The Country Girls was Unesco book of the year for the 2019 One City One Book festival in Dublin. A stage adaptation played to full houses in Dublin, Limerick, Cork and Galway.
But her mother never came to terms with her daughter’s literary career and Edna came to dread her letters (“Oh God, what now?”) constantly worrying about the state of her daughter’s immortal soul. 
In several of her short stories an older, exiled woman returns to the Ireland of her youth and confronts the shrunken authority figures who once seemed so enormous. My Two Mothers, a reflection on her relationship with her own mother, ends with a wish to meet her dead mother in a dream, “to begin our journey all over again, to live our lives as they should have been lived, happy, trusting, and free of shame”.
Edna O’Brien was appointed an honorary DBE for services to literature in 2018.
She is survived by her two sons.
Edna O’Brien, born December 15 1930, died July 27 2024