Edna O’Brien, the prolific Irish writer whose evocative and graphic tales of lost loves earned her a literary reputation that matched the dark and complex lives of her tragic heroines, died Saturday at the age of 93.
Her death was announced on social media by her publisher, Faber, who only said she died “after a long illness.” She had spoken in recent years about her cancer treatment.
Ms. O’Brien wrote dozens of novels and short story collections over nearly 60 years, beginning in 1960 with “The Country Girls,” a book about the emotional conflicts of two young Irish girls who rebel against their Roman Catholic upbringing.
Her books often feature strong-willed but insecure women who love men who are rude, unfaithful, or already married. Much of her early work had autobiographical aspects, which sparked rumors about her morality and led to personal attacks against her in Ireland.
When her writings were first published, she was considered a literary pioneer whose distinctive style gave voice to women whose passions had never before been described with such honesty.
“I learned from her,” the American novelist Mary Gordon once said, “especially her way of writing about the intensity and danger of childhood. She described a kind of girlhood that had never been spoken of before.”
But the audacity of her writing never won her the sympathy of the women’s rights movement, which resented her depictions of unlucky spinsters and desperate mistresses. Ms. O’Brien took this rejection in stride.
“I’m not particularly sensitive to things that affect them,” she once said, referring to women’s rights activists. “I’m particularly sensitive to childhood, to truth or falsehood, and to the true expression of feelings.”
For decades, her work was more celebrated outside Ireland than in her home country, which she left permanently in the 1960s. With her auburn hair, green eyes, and Irish country accent, she was considered by non-Irish critics to be the very embodiment of Ireland. But in Ireland, her persona seemed too rich to be true. (Irish literary critic Denis Donoghue called her “the Irishwoman of the stage.”)
Her work eventually won over many critics. In 2001, she received the Irish PEN Lifetime Achievement Award and, in 2018, the PEN/Nabokov Prize for her contribution to international literature.
But the early criticism left a lasting impression. “Country Girls” had shamed her conservative Catholic parents living in rural western Ireland. The book’s frank descriptions of the girls’ sexual adventures appalled many, and with the approval of the Catholic Church hierarchy, the book was banned in Ireland, as were several others.
The book was dedicated to Ms. O’Brien’s mother, but “my parents were too ashamed to be proud” and never recovered from the hurt, she said. After her mother died, Ms. O’Brien found a copy of “The Country Girls” that she had given her years before. The dedication page had been torn out and the offending words had been erased with pen.
But readers, especially women, and critics in other countries, including the United States and Britain, found her work compelling, touching, and sincere. She gained a reputation as a woman who often had love affairs, but she maintained that having lovers did not make her a flighty woman.
“I believe in love, not promiscuity, and they don’t go together,” she said in a 1995 interview with The New York Times. “I’m a romantic. We’re very wise in our minds, but in our hearts we’re very turbulent.”
Above all, she believed she should be judged by her writing, which could be vivid, intense, and risky, or overdone, indistinct, and worthy of a Hallmark postcard. Some of her most remarkable efforts came when she used the banality of rural life to explore deep emotions.
In The House of Splendid Isolation (1994), she writes: “I think of the arguments, the arguments about money, of my husband putting on his cap to go out and escape from me, a greasy black cap in which his anger had leaked, of the bacon and the cabbage, of the dogs howling at the leftovers, of the rainstorms, and in spite of it all, there was this river in me, the expectation of something wonderful. When did I lose it? When did it go? I want to be myself again before I die.”
Josephine Edna O’Brien was born on December 15, 1930. (She once told a reporter, “If I die and you write my obituary, don’t give my age.”) Her parents, Michael and Lena (Cleary) O’Brien, lived on a farm in Tuamgraney, a rural hamlet in County Clare that Ms O’Brien describes as “a very scary and captivating place”.
Although she had three siblings, she was a solitary child who wandered in the woods near her home, imagining stories and filling notebooks with her tales. In 1941 she entered the Convent of Mercy in Loughrea, County Galway, with the intention of becoming a nun. She stayed there for five years before going to Dublin, where she worked in a pharmacy.
In Dublin, Mrs O’Brien read widely and began submitting short stories to newspaper competitions, encouraged by the Czech-Irish novelist Ernest Gébler. Rebelling against the constraints of their rural community, they eloped in the early 1950s. The marriage did not last, and after their divorce, Mrs O’Brien took her two sons with her to London.
Mr. Gébler died in 1998. Mrs. O’Brien is survived by her sons Sasha, an architect, and Carlo, a writer, as well as several grandchildren.
In 1960, she achieved international fame with “The Country Girls,” a novel she wrote in a fit of inspiration that lasted two and a half weeks. It tells the story of two young Catholic girls, the shy and sensitive Kate Brady and her rebellious friend Baba Brennan, and their sexual awakening in Dublin.
Expelled from the convent, Kate describes her first lover: “The moment was altogether perfect for me; and all that I had suffered up to that time was comforted by the sweetness of his soft, lisping voice; whispering, whispering, like snowflakes. He kissed me. It was a real kiss. It affected my whole body. My toes, though numb and pinched in the new shoes, responded to the kiss, and for a few minutes my soul was lost.”
Mrs. O’Brien wrote other novels about Kate and Baba, and her reputation was established. The misfortunes of love were to be the central theme of her work, leading one critic to ask “why is the luck of her women so bad?” Her heroines were repeatedly abandoned, betrayed, and troubled by accidents and illnesses that were often interpreted as divine punishment for their infidelity.
In addition to publishing more than two dozen novels over the course of her long career, she also produced short stories, plays and several works of nonfiction, including a short biography of James Joyce published in 1999 and “Byron in Love” (2009), which examined the poet’s amorous exploits.
Francine Prose, in a 2019 article in The New York Times Book Review, cited Ms. O’Brien’s ability to “inhabit the minds of her characters” even when writing about people and events “remote from her own experience.” She brought to life an IRA killer in “House of Splendid Isolation” and a serial killer in “In the Forest” (2002), both set in Ireland.
In 2016, Little, Brown & Company published his novel Little Red Chairs, which tells the story of a mysterious sexologist who arrives in a rural village in the west of Ireland. After bewitching a local woman, his true identity, that of a Serbian war criminal, is revealed.
“But O’Brien is not trying to make a splash,” writes Joyce Carol Oates in The Times Book Review, “and Little Red Chairs is not a suspense novel, much less a detective story or a thriller; it is something more challenging, a work of meditation and penance. How can one accept one’s own complicity with evil, even if that complicity is ‘innocent’?”
In 2019, at the age of 88, Ms O’Brien ventured beyond Irish shores for her book “Girl”, a harrowing account of the teenage girls kidnapped and abused in 2014 by the extremist group Boko Haram in Nigeria.
Ms O’Brien travelled to Nigeria to research the book, speaking to victims about their ordeal and incorporating some of their raw details into her writing. “I was a girl once, but not anymore,” the poignant opening line reads. “I smell. The blood has dried and crusted over me and my wrapping is in tatters. My insides are a quagmire.”
The book was widely praised, but O’Brien was criticized for tackling a subject that was so clearly foreign to her. She defended her decision to write about Boko Haram, rejecting accusations of cultural appropriation by insisting that the theme of “Girl” transcended the tragedy of the individual characters and reflected the same women’s struggles against poverty, violence and sexual exploitation that she had explored many times since the publication of “The Country Girls.”
Such struggles, she believed, are both universal and eternal, no matter where their stories take place.
“I don’t know whether I’m going to last or not,” she said in a 1989 interview with The New York Times Magazine. “All I know is that I want to write about something that has nothing to do with fashion and that doesn’t fit into any period or any journalistic point of view. I want to write about something that applies to any period, because it’s a state of mind.”
Despite her troubles with the church, she remained a faithful Catholic. But she said she preferred to confess her sins in foreign countries, such as Italy, where priests barely understood English and readily granted absolution.
Even while battling cancer, O’Brien continued to write daily, with pen and paper, usually early in the morning, so that she could, as she once noted, “go straight from my dreams to my work.”
James Clarity, a Times correspondent who died in 2007, contributed to this report.