Edna O'Brien Novelist (1931-)
Lunch with FT July 16, 2017

"I never wanted to be old but I couldn't stop it."

Born in County Clare, Ireland, she was sent to a Catholic school and forbidden to study literature.  She married to escape her overbearing mother and environment, but her husband turned out to be equally controlling.  She began working   as a reader of manscripts for a publisher and her work was so impressive they commissioned her to write a novel.  The first was The Country Girls, about two rural friends who escape a convent school to Dublin and have adventures of the kind we had in the sixties, which would now feel tame.  Not so to Ireland, where the book is banned.  Although she has written other novels she considers better, she is still proud to be defined by this book. 

"I wish in my early life I had stood up a bit more, but all things considered I was pretty brave.  You know, if you start off with a pretty terrifying start, you have many handicaps - many handicaps."  Her novels are about women who escape an unpromising start to make their own way in the world, instead of the traditional male in this role.  O'Brien did not just invert this tradition, she lived the inversion.  The result appears to be a woman in love with the freedom she has won and conscious what it has cost.