Eimear McBride
Although I’ve known for a while I wouldn’t be seeing her again, I’m heartbroken to hear the news of Edna’s death. Her writing has been with me since I was too young to experience it in any but the purest form, direct from writer to reader across the page. Free from the noise of critics, and the cultural baggage of all those battles she fought, her words just burned through me, alive with feeling and beauty and want. To be a body, to be a woman, to suffer and to love, no one wrote of these experiences as she did. Few could accept then, and even now, her delight in the complexity of human relationships, writing of their difficulties not only as a given but as a gift. Edna lived through so many generations of writers, sometimes in fashion and sometimes not, but her work never wavered from her belief that literature – underneath all the grub, right down in its soul – was about feeling and beauty and truth. So she wrote about the hard things honestly and humanely but, above all, beautifully – sometimes even transcendentally. Because of that, and although her great, wicked, funny self is now gone, her work will always remain with us as a beacon and a temptation and a joy.
Kevin Power
Coincidentally – though are these things ever really coincidences? – I spent some time last week reading and thinking about Edna O’Brien. I’m working on an academic book chapter that surveys the 21st-century Irish novel; my starting point, chronologically as well as thematically, is In the Forest (2002). This was the book in which O’Brien fictionalised, hauntingly and brilliantly, the Imelda Riney case: the murder in 1994 of a young mother and her four-year-old son Liam, as well as the priest Father Joe Cleary, by the state-raised abuse victim and violent recidivist Brendan O’Donnell, in Cregg Wood, Co Clare.
When the book was published, O’Brien was savagely criticised for allegedly “exploiting” the details of a painful case. But what O’Brien understood was that the story of what happened to Imelda Riney and her murderer was also the story of Ireland in the second half of the 20th century. In the Forest was not greeted for what it was: that is, a novel about Ireland’s haunted and grief-stricken transition from Catholic authoritarianism to – something else. Once again, Edna O’Brien was ahead of her time. But she must have been used to it, by that stage. In the Forest made it possible for later writers to fictionalise public events in such a way that they could help us all think about Ireland as it changed. But this is what Edna O’Brien had been doing all along – since The Country Girls appeared, at the very beginning of her career, in 1960. She gave us all permission. It was her great gift.
Sinéad Gleeson
There are moments in your reading life – especially if you end up being a writer – that never leave you. They are inked in the brain, and rise up intensely whenever said writer’s name comes up, or they publish a new book. In my teens, I found a battered Penguin paperback of The Country Girls at a sale of work, and from there hunted down the rest of the trilogy. It was immediately clear that despite differing histories and concerns as Irish women decades apart, O’Brien had captured something of our national psyche that I hadn’t encountered before. In a century of silences, particularly around women’s lives and stories, Edna’s voice was loud as a bell: fluid and intelligent. In the face of sexism and exclusion by her male contemporaries, she remained uncompromising, doing the work, moving in a more experimental direction. I’m struck that her passing comes on the same weekend as the anniversary of another visionary artist, Sinéad O’Connor. Like Sinéad, Edna O’Brien’s work interrogated so many things about Ireland and has left a deep imprint as one of Ireland’s greatest storytellers.
[ Edna O’Brien obituary: flamboyant, fearless, and outspoken Irish writerOpens in new window ]
Nuala O’Connor
Edna O’Brien was one of my literary goddesses – I’ve had a lifetime of enjoying her candid, funny, pin-sharp writing. I heard her say at a literary event in Cork that language was “sacred” to her, and it felt like the perfect word to describe her life of devotion to words. I’m glad Ireland as a whole got around to appreciating her eventually; I think Irish women have always felt grateful to Edna for holding up dazzling mirrors to hypocrites and shame-mongers. She was the kind of warrior that bookish girls like me always appreciated and tried to emulate. We knew she had to go; we thank her for paving the way; we will miss her.
Diarmaid Ferriter
In her own words Edna O’Brien wanted “to go out as someone who spoke the truth”. For all her fame and the extent to which her name is inextricably linked with the clash of traditional and modern Ireland, the battles over censorship and the moral panics generated by those who wrote about intimate thoughts concerning life, love, sexuality, and the status of women, O’Brien looked on them as secondary to her primal impulse to write. As a historian I found her excavation of interior lives hugely helpful when trying to do justice to context and emotional hinterlands. As she put it, she liked to write about “the disturbances within”, and mastering that was not only a great literary achievement, but something the value of which was increasingly appreciated as Ireland grappled with confronting its denials and their consequences.
Éilís Ní Dhuibhne
In that first novel, The Country Girls, in her clear, coldly passionate, description of the sexual awakening of a girl, Edna O’Brien furnished a model for future writing by Irish women. She wrote about sex as if it were normal. And this was extraordinary, in Ireland, in 1960. But it was going to get ordinary about 10 years later, when writers like me were coming of age. Thanks to Edna O’Brien, we – and the many writers who came later – had no scruples about writing about life and emotions as they really were. And all this in its setting. Edna O’Brien’s evocations of the landscape of Clare, of the life in an Irish small town, of the eccentric characters which populate the small and big towns, are unsurpassed.
She was our Chekhov, our Alice Munro, our Annie Ernaux. I loved her writing. I loved her style, her dedication, her hard work, her genius. Her.
Joseph O’Connor
Edna’s work ended silences and broke open new ground. Generations of writers and readers loved her fearlessness and her clear sense of writerly vision and mission but also her remarkable storytelling and the grace of her sentences. To many of us, she was heroic but she wore her magnificence lightly. She was a wry, funny, very charming presence, full of mischief and seriousness, darkness and sparkle, and her work on other writers was so edgy and compelling. We have lost the high queen of Irish fiction but her influence will long be felt and the work long loved.
Eoin McNamee
Edna O’Brien brought a deep cosmopolitan strain in the Irish psyche to light. She showed us who we might be, how we might set about righting ourselves. She brought glamour at a time when it was hard for us to imagine that we could be glamorous. None of this would matter if it wasn’t underpinned by the qualities of a great writer. We owe her a great deal.
[ Carlo Gébler on his mother Edna O’Brien: Coming to the endOpens in new window ]
Margaret Kelleher
Readers here in Ireland and around the world are deeply saddened to read of Edna O’Brien’s death; her fearless championing of artistic freedom will be long remembered as will her gift in recording life’s brutality and beauty throughout her exceptional literary career. At the Museum of Literature Ireland, we were honoured to receive her permission to establish the annual Edna O’Brien Young Writers Award in tribute to her; and thanks to the dedication of Susie Lopez, Simon O’Connor and MoLI colleagues, already more than seventy young writers have participated in this programme, following her trailblazing path.
Margaret Kelleher, chair of Anglo-Irish Literature and Drama, University College Dublin
Dermot Bolger
Throughout my entire lifetime (I was born months after her ground-breaking Country Girls was published) Edna O’Brien was a fearless teller of uncomfortable truths, who dared to be utterly original and honest about the totality of her experiences and feelings as an Irish woman in an often hostile world. She brilliantly wrote about her hero James Joyce, and I suspect she would have cherished his credo in which he said: “I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it calls itself my home, my fatherland, or my church.” In saying this, I don’t mean that she ever turned her back on Ireland, but instead, by threading such a brave path and original path, she paid Ireland a far greater service by writing about the female experience in such a devastatingly courageous manner, during her more than six decades as a writer. That journey started with the relative innocence of Kate and Baba in The Country Girls and ended with her final novel, Girl, that described the experiences of a Nigerian girl abducted by Boko Haram. Her life, and her life’s work, was an astonishing journey that greatly enriched Irish and world literature.
Peter Fallon
Something has ended with the end of the life of Edna O’Brien. Whether it was in the course of a public event, or private reception, or personal visit to her home in London there was always in her person what was there in her writing - style.
One of the earliest champions of Brian Friel’s fictions, she later sought help from him with her own dramatic undertakings. She knew who to pick out, and who to turn to.
I know that women read her books and recognised themselves in them. It should be added that many of us men who read her attentively learned much from those same books.
Edna and I shared the love of a place and we were fortunate, through the kindness of a mutual friend from New York, Ed Downe, to be offered a house in the grounds of Ballynahinch Castle in Connemara as a bolt hole, a retreat to go to to finish work. Somehow it bound us.
Much will be written of Edna’s fearlessness. I hope her fun is not forgotten.
We shall not see her like again.
Oh, her poor boys.
Danielle McLaughlin
The several times that I was lucky enough to get to hear Edna O’Brien read her own work have stayed with me vividly. That extraordinary voice! The way that she could command the room! And the sense among the audience that we were in the presence of someone remarkable and beloved, someone to whom we owed a great debt. I cherish her writing for its independence of thought and language, for the way she brought to the page the impact of Ireland’s social stratifications on the lives of women. Her stories are her own faithful record of what she once described as her “little corner of experience” that she registered and retold. With her passing, we have lost one of our great truth tellers, a writer who illuminated the workings of interlocking systems of power.
John Boyne
I only met Edna O’Brien on a few occasions but, each time, I felt as if I was in the presence of royalty. Her physical presence, her extraordinary intelligence, her ability to speak with such wisdom and clarity, intimidated me in a way no other writer ever has. I’ve been reading her since I was a teenager and, as someone who’s always been drawn to stories of women, particularly those who were victims of the historical Irish patriarchy – as in, most of them – I valued her books enormously. Perhaps none more than her final novel, Girl, which was inspired by the kidnapping of 276 girls by the Boko Haram group in Nigeria and published when she was almost 90 years old. We should all be so lucky to have the skill to engage with politics, gender, violence, and literature when we’re that age. She’s a loss to literature, but she was also a gift to literature, and for that we should be grateful.
John Banville
She was entrancing: one of the warmest, sharpest-tongued, most companionable and funniest creatures it has been my good fortune to know. I did not see her often enough – which now of course I bitterly regret – but when we did meet she was never less than a delight.
Her early books, so fresh, so direct, so finely wrought, were a revolution in Irish writing. They were too good for her to have kept up always to their standard, but keep on she did, dauntlessly.
Who could have foretold that the country girl who came to Dublin in the early 1950s and worked in a chemist’s shop would produce work so limpid yet so forceful as the early ‘Girls’ trilogy – I think of it as a trilogy – or that she would end her long career with another novel about girls, this time the ones who were kidnapped en masse by Boko Haram terrorists in Nigeria in 2014? Her reach was wide.
Here is my favourite Edna story.
She and Colm Tóibín and I did a joint reading at Harvard one long-ago summer Saturday afternoon. Colm went first and was warmly applauded. I was on next. The audience was mostly young, and eager to be entertained. I managed to find in one of my books a few pages which, given a charitable hearing, might be considered humorous. And I did get a few laughs – more, indeed, than the piece deserved.
I finished, bowed, and went back to my seat in the front row. Edna, after the inevitable and deliberate delay, tottered up to the stage, looked down at me, leant close to the microphone and said in that velvety hoarse whisper of hers, ‘Oh, John, I wish I could be funny – like you.’ How deftly, how delicately, she could insert the blade.
She and I were staying at the same hotel in Harvard, and after the reading we went back there and had a drink together in the bar. She told me she was due to dine that evening in the hotel restaurant with the Australian art critic Robert Hughes – a fine writer but, like Simon Dedalus, a noisy self-willed man – and in her accustomed, kindly fashion she invited me to join them. I said I would be happy to, of course.
Edna went off to have “a little rest”, and I stayed on in the bar with a book. Presently Robert Hughes came in – he was also a guest at the hotel. Immediately he was buttonholed by one of those professional Irishmen in which Harvard abounded in those days. The blowhard bade Hughes to sit down at a table with him and proceeded to blow hard into his face.
I concentrated on my book.
However, when Hughes rose to leave, I heard the Irishman say that he looked forward to meeting him later, at 7pm. This was the time appointed by Edna for our dinner à trois.
She came down at 6.45, and I told her what I had overheard, and pointed out the Irishman, who was now standing at the bar loudly boring someone else. ‘I don’t know who he is,’ Edna said, ‘but I know he’s not coming to dinner with us.’ Then she bade me ‘go into the restaurant and mind the table’ while she dealt with the situation. Five minutes later, as I was dutifully minding the table, Edna swept in, sat down and ordered a glass of white wine– “dry as a bone, mind,” she told the waiter, smiling sweetly.
I gave her an inquiring look, and she said that Bob would be down in a minute to join us.
“And the Irishman?” I asked.
“Oh, don’t mind him,” she said. “He’s gone.”
I asked with interest how she had got rid of him. She shrugged and said:
“I told him to f**k off.”
And she did not use asterisks.
The dinner turned out to be a rather flat affair, though I do vividly recall the tie that Hughes was wearing, on which was painted an impossibly curvaceous nude.
Afterwards, Edna and I went back to the bar for a nightcap, and drank a few brandies too many, and she spoke plangently of “home” and shed a little tear. We finished our drinks and took the elevator to our rooms, and as we whirred upwards Edna leant back against the mirror and gave me one of her famously sultry looks.
“What floor are you on, John?” she asked, but then said with a sigh and a shrug: “Not that it matters ...”
But with Edna, everything mattered, as it must for any writer worth her salt – and she was worth barrelfuls of the stuff.
Oh, dear, how we shall miss her. In a darkening world she was a lovely light, and will remain so, unextinguished.
President Michael D Higgins
It is with great sorrow that I have heard of the passing of a dear friend of Sabina’s and mine, Edna O’Brien.
Edna O’Brien has been one of the outstanding writers of modern times, her work has been sought as model all around the world.
Edna was a fearless teller of truths, a superb writer possessed of the moral courage to confront Irish society with realities long ignored and suppressed.
Through that deeply insightful work, rich in humanity, Edna O’Brien was one of the first writers to provide a true voice to the experiences of women in Ireland in their different generations and played an important role in transforming the status of women across Irish society.
While the beauty of her work was immediately recognised abroad, it is important to remember the hostile reaction it provoked among those who wished for the lived experience of women to remain far from the world of Irish literature, with her books shamefully banned upon their early publication.
Thankfully Edna O’Brien’s work is now recognised for the superb works of art which they are. As President of Ireland, I was delighted to present Edna with the Torc of the Saoi of Aosdána in 2015, and with a Presidential Distinguished Service Award in 2018. Her election as Saoi, chosen by her fellow artists, was the ultimate expression of the esteem in which her work is held.
That work will continue to celebrate the full freedom that a writer must have, the risks and contradictions of circumstance, the release into beauty that imagination makes possible.
May I express my deepest condolences to Edna’s children Carlo and Marcus, to her family and friends, to her follow members of Aosdána, and to all those who love her work across the world.
