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The Independent UK
The Independent UK
Lifestyle
Lynn Enright

My encounter with Edna O’Brien, the great literary crusader and giant of Irish literature

Edna OBrien Ireland Lynn Paddy McKillen Cait James Joyce TS Eliot Dublin
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By the time I read Edna O’Brien’s debut novel The Country Girls for the first time, I was in my early twenties and it was no longer so shocking. When it was published in 1960, it was banned in Ireland, but not before a priest in Limerick had burned copies after the rosary. The English novelist LP Hartley deemed its protagonists, the teenage Cait and Baba, a pair of “nymphomaniacs”.

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