Edna O’Brien, a trailblazing Irish novelist who was her own unique water-diviner Premium

Edna O'Brien, the Irish writer, defied societal norms with her lyrical prose, resilience, and courage in storytelling.

“When I was a child in Ireland, a spring would suddenly appear and yield forth buckets of beautiful clear water, then just as suddenly it would dry up. The water-diviners would come with their rods and sometimes another spring would be found. One has to be one’s own water-diviner.”

In six decades of writing on love, loss, and Ireland, Edna O’Brien was her own unique water-diviner. In terms of the lovely nature-based metaphor she used in a celebrated Paris Review interview, her prose was an endless spring: clear, deeply felt, and often very funny.

Yet her debut novel The Country Girls faced a wrathful reception when it was first published in 1960. The book was immediately banned in her home country; copies were publicly burned; and she began to receive the first of many nasty anonymous letters.

Her response to that was she wrote two sequels in quick succession, The Lonely Girl (1962) and Girls in their Married Bliss (1964). All the novels in the trilogy spoke with fresh and clear abandon about family violence, religious hypocrisy, female friendship, defiance of convention, and the interior lives of young Irish women. All the novels were promptly banned in Ireland.

The bans did not stop Edna O’Brien from blazing a new trail. Her lyrical prose, intensity of feeling, and candour had a major impact on writers who came after her. For Anne Enright, O’Brien was “the great, the only, survivor of forces that silenced and destroyed who knows how many other Irish women writers.”

It is a measure of the distance travelled by Irish society that last month, after Edna O’Brien’s death at the age of 94, Irish President Michael Higgins paid tribute to her work for “the moral courage to confront Irish society with realities long ignored and suppressed.”

Ireland was O’Brien’s great theme. As an exile who lived in London for most her life, she nevertheless chose to be buried in Ireland in her home village. In an interview about her archive, she explained her intense relationship with the country of her birth: “First of all I’m Irish. I was born in Ireland. My remains will go to Ireland. As a young child and as a girl Ireland fed me imaginatively and emotionally.”