Of all the adjectives used to describe Edna O’Brien in the many tributes paid since the announcement over the weekend of her death at the age of 93, one recurs the most and seems to distil her achievements best: fearless .
Across a writing life spanning more than seven decades, O’Brien was determined that she would never be prevented from engaging fully with the world on her own terms, seeing it through her own eyes and describing it with her own words. It was a fearless assertion of individual agency and creative autonomy.
For the Irish establishment of the mid-20th century, such defiance, especially from a young female artist, was an outrage and an affront to both Church and State. O’Brien’s first novel, The Country Girls, which dared to explore female sexual desire with intelligence and humour through the story of two young women as they move from girlhood in rural Co Clare to adulthood in Dublin, was banned from bookshops and denounced from pulpits. The same fate would befall subsequent novels.
For showing up the hypocrisies and smug pieties of her native country, she was vilified. But there was more than a little compensation in the fact that her ostracisation contributed to her becoming an international celebrity and, for many around the world, a true symbol of Irishness.
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All of this means O’Brien’s place is assured in the story of this country’s long struggle against insularity, illiberalism and misogyny. It would be wrong, however, to see her purely as an agent of social change. She was first and foremost an artist, committed to her writing, wherever it might take her, and no matter how difficult or awkward the subject. The themes of her later novels included murder, terrorism and rape. For her final book, Girl, published almost 60 years after The Country Girls, and based on the abduction of a group of girls by Boko Haram jihadists, she travelled in her late 80s to Nigeria to carry out research.
Writing in the The Irish Times, Anne Enright and Eimear McBride identified how important O’Brien has been to them in bringing the experiences and voices of women out of the shadows and in from the margins of what was until relatively recently a deeply patriarchal society. In doing so, she helped to open a door for further generations of writers and artists.
Her longevity, and the remarkable length of her active writing career, meant that she experienced, absorbed and wrote about worlds which have been utterly transformed, for good and ill, in the decades between her first novel and her last. Her legacy. then, is twofold: first and foremost in the vividness, honesty and beauty of her writing, but also in the example of a life lived to the full and without fear.