One created an outcry and her books were banned, the other was a loved and lauded national treasure – but now Edna O’Brien and Maeve Binchy are somewhat surprising bedfellows, cited regularly as inspirations by the latest crop of Irish women writers.
Burned, banned and reviled in 1960s Ireland, Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls was rejected by the Irish censor for its sexually explicit content, reportedly set on fire by her local parish priest and condemned as filth by everyone from politicians to archbishops. Published 22 years later, Maeve Binchy’s first novel, Light a Penny Candle, had a rather different birth, reportedly selling for the then largest sum ever paid by a British publisher for a first novel – £52,000 – and quickly becoming an international bestseller. Today both women are icons for many of the writers following in their footsteps.
“I don’t think people realise the massive debt that Irish writers owe to Edna O’Brien,” says Kildare author Louise Nealon, whose debut novel Snowflake won the 2021 Irish Book Awards Newcomer of the Year. “She sacrificed so much in her personal life to become a writer. When her mother read her work, she buried her book in the garden, not before she blotted out the bits that were deemed sinful. Her husband read her first novel and said, ‘You can write, and I will never forgive you.’ I read O’Brien’s memoir Country Girl in a fit of admiration and rage.”
O’Brien’s works have not only stood the test of time but have grown in stature over the years. However the acclaim has been slow enough coming, says Louise Kennedy, the Sligo-based author of the 2021 short story collection The End of the World is a Cul de Sac and novel Trespasses, published this month.
“She definitely hasn’t had the attention and respect she deserved until very recently in Ireland, she was completely vilified. I don’t know many writers in the country who received a public apology from the president, which Edna O’Brien did a few years ago because of the way she was treated. She is considered to be a literary giant abroad but was she ever appreciated enough here?”
International reputations
Dublin writer Anne Griffin, with two bestselling novels under her belt – When All Is Said won Newcomer of the Year at the 2019 Irish Book Awards, Listening Still was published last year – credits both O’Brien and Binchy as giving a leg-up to the current crop of new Irish writers.
“Our opportunities have come on the backs of great writers like Edna O’Brien and Maeve Binchy, anybody who went out there internationally. We’re sitting on their coat tails and they’ve brought us up, they really have, their standard and their ability to reach a wide range of readers have meant people have come looking.”
Other more recent writers too are credited with the upswing. “I do think there is a really warm healthy culture of writers throwing their hands out and pulling other people up behind them,” says Louise Kennedy. “I’ve had great help from Sinead Gleeson, Liz Nugent and Marian Keyes, and these are writers from all sorts of genres.”
From all sorts of genres is right. O’Brien and Binchy might once have been considered poles apart, one writing “literature”, the other cosy “chick lit” but these days it appears the lines are becoming more blurred between “literary” and “commercial” fiction’. And that’s no bad thing.
Marian Keyes has been notoriously vocal about the derogatory categorisation of books written about the lives of women for a mass market, claiming the term “chick lit” is almost an insult – “Books about the lives of men are not diminished or demeaned in the same way.”
These days, writers from many different genres are proud to name writers of commercial women’s fiction as paving the way for them all. Take Fiona Scarlett from Dublin, whose debut novel Boys Don’t Cry, published by Faber and shortlisted for last year’s Sunday Independent Newcomer of the Year at the Irish Book Awards, is a gripping and gritty story of two young brothers growing up in a working-class Dublin estate where poverty, violence and drugs are no strangers.
‘Luck as a nation’
“I think we’re incredibly lucky as a nation to have had wealth of great women writers, the likes of Edna O’Brien, Anne Enright, Marian Keyes and Maeve Binchy,” she says. “We’ve always been lucky to have this writing going on in our country. The success of any female writer in Ireland is the success of everybody, because I genuinely do think it brings readers to Irish female fiction.”
The books of publishing phenomenon Sally Rooney have blurred the lines even more between literary fiction and commercial bestsellers, attracting critical acclaim and awards galore while selling millions of copies and being adapted for TV – twice. Normal People not only got us through the early months of the first 2020 lockdown, it also livened up Liveline no end – yes, it was the longest sex scene ever shown on RTÉ. Suddenly we were right back in Edna O’Brien’s 1960s Catholic Ireland, with howls of indignation against teenage “fornication”, sex before marriage and Bishop Michael Cox calling for the show to be binned. Next up, Conversations with Friends airs on RTÉ, BBC and HBO in May.
Originally from Westport, Rooney has named JD Salinger’s Franny and Zooey as the book that had the most influence on her own writing, and reveals her comfort read to be Jane Austen – the original chick-lit author if everything you read online is to be believed.
But Rooney isn’t the cause of this massive rise in attention for Irish authors, she is merely part of it, says Louise Kennedy – “Marian Keyes had sold 35 million books by the time Sally Rooney was published.”
“I think there’s been a rising interest in Irish writers over the last decade and while Sally Rooney has been an amazing ambassador for Irish women’s writing, there was also a path cleared for Sally by those who came before her,” says Una Mannion, the Sligo-based author whose novel The Crooked Tree, published by Faber, won the 2022 Kate O’Brien Award.
Those “who came before her” stretch back a long way of course, past Edna O’Brien to Norah Hoult, Maeve Brennan, Kate O’Brien and Mary Lavin, to mention just a few.
Male poster
Mary Lavin’s granddaughter, Alice Ryan, is the latest to join the rising stars of new Irish writing. The Dublin author’s debut novel, There’s Been a Little Incident, will be published by Head of Zeus in September.
“Although Irish female writers have in the past received less acclaim than their male counterparts – we all remember the infamous all-male poster of ‘Irish Writers’ hanging in our classroom – those readers who were aware of their work cherished them like precious gems. When I meet people today who love my grandmother’s work, we speak as though we are in possession of a great secret, insider trading on the black story market.”
Ryan says she has been inspired by many Irish women writers, in particular Christine Dwyer Hickey and also Deirdre Madden, Maeve Brennan, Binchy and Keyes. She loves the wry and witty views that Irish women offer of everyday life - “In Maeve Binchy’s Evening Class there is a man called Pillow Case for some reason they had all forgotten. In Marian Keyes’ Grown Ups, the woman who loves to cook for her family actually uses caterers.”
Kathleen Murray from Carlow, whose debut novel The Deadwood Encore is out at the end of April, says she loves to see somebody reading a Keyes book when she goes on holidays.
“I feel so positive when I think about the popularity of Irish women’s writing all over the world. I imagine what it’s like to be in another country and to have an Irish book, to read about life in Ireland. When you get a lot of people reading good stories, that opens up a space for other writers.”
The generosity shown by the writing community to those who are starting off has done much to open up that space she believes, mentioning Stinging Fly publisher Declan Meade, “who has been hugely supportive of new writing and very conscious of women getting fair representation”.
From a rich heritage to continued support from a community of established authors, it looks like new Irish writing is in a strong position to continue its world domination. Doing Binchy and O’Brien proud – long may it continue.
