O'Brien, Edna

▪ Irish author

born Dec. 15, 1930, Twamgraney, County Clare, Ire.

      Irish novelist, short-story writer, and screenwriter whose work has been noted for its portrayal of women, evocative description, and sexual candour. Like the works of her predecessors James Joyce and Frank O'Connor, some of her books have been banned in Ireland.

      O'Brien began to produce sketches and tales during childhood. She received a strict Irish Catholic convent education and went on to study pharmacy in Dublin, where she received a license in 1950. In 1952 she married the novelist Ernest Gebler, with whom she had two sons. In 1959 the couple moved to London, where O'Brien turned to writing as a full-time occupation. She was divorced from Gebler in the mid-1960s.

      O'Brien's popular first novel, The Country Girls (1960), was the first volume of The Country Girls Trilogy. It had as its main characters two Irish girls who leave their strict homes and convent school for the excitement and romantic opportunities of Dublin. The girls' subsequent lives are traced in The Lonely Girl (1962) and Girls in Their Married Bliss (1964), by which time both have settled in London and have become disillusioned with marriage and men in general. Among O'Brien's many subsequent novels are August Is a Wicked Month (1965), Casualties of Peace (1966), Night (1972), Johnny I Hardly Knew You (1977; U.S. title I Hardly Knew You), The High Road (1988), House of Splendid Isolation (1994), Down by the River (1996), In the Forest (2002), and The Light of Evening (2006).

      O'Brien's novels express her despair over the condition of women in contemporary society and, in particular, attack women's repressive upbringing. Her heroines search unsuccessfully for fulfillment in relationships with men, typically engaging in doomed love trysts as a remedy for their loneliness and emotional isolation. The bleak tone of O'Brien's novels is, however, broken by flights of lyrical description and by the heroines' attainment of brief periods of happiness.

      Collections of O'Brien's short stories appeared as The Love Object (1968), A Scandalous Woman and Other Stories (1974), A Fanatic Heart (1984), and Lantern Slides (1990). She also wrote plays, screenplays for film and television, and nonfiction about Ireland. In 1999 her short study James Joyce was published to critical acclaim.

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