Female friendship, intense longing and unapologetic sex – Edna O’Brien, who died yesterday aged 93, was scandalising Ireland with stories about the interior lives and erotic adventures of young women 50 years before Sally Rooney was born. “The Country Girls is not the novel that broke the mould, it is the one that made it … O’Brien gave voice to a previously muzzled generation of Irish women,” A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing author Eimear McBride wrote of O’Brien’s 1960 first novel. The Country Girls was famously banned in Ireland, copies were burnt by priests and the local postmistress in the village where O’Brien grew up said she “should be kicked naked through the streets”. Even the author’s own mother declared her a disgrace.
While she was famous for sex, she was writing – lyrically, sentimentally sometimes – about love, which, as fellow Irish novelist Anne Enright pointed out in her review of Rooney’s most recent novel, always makes some people cross. O’Brien herself felt that her great subject was loss – “loss of love, loss of self, loss of God.” In a conversation with Philip Roth, who declared her “the most gifted woman now writing fiction in English”, back in 1984, she said: “Love replaced religion for me in my sense of fervor. When I began to look for earthly love (ie, sex), I felt that I was cutting myself off from God.”
