Edna O'Brien

Throughout her career, contemporary Irish writer EOB has published novels, short stories, drama, screen and teleplays, poetry, travel writing, and children's books. Her imaginative writing, in which she experiments with linguistic and narrative conventions, almost always presents a woman's perspective. She often deals with such themes as personal and national identity, love affairs, exile, memory, and death. She is not a writer who caters to her readers' comfort, but concentrates steadily on the darker sides of life.

Milestones

15 December 1930

EOB was born in Tuamgraney, County Clare, the youngest of four surviving children.
Many standard sources give her birthdate as 1936 and some as 1932.
Eckley, Grace. Edna O’Brien. Bucknell University Press.
17

By February 1960

EOB published her first novel, The Country Girls. It then fell foul of the Irish Censorhip Board, and the close and personal interest in the board taken by the Archbishop of Dublin, John Charles McQuaid .
Fitzgerald, Penelope. “Bringers of Ill Luck and Bad Weather”. London Review of Books, Vol.
22
, No. 5, p. 8.
“Dictionary of Literary Biography online”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Center-LRC.
231
Halio, Jay L., editor. Dictionary of Literary Biography 14. Gale Research.
572

12 August 1996

Thirty-six years after The Country Girls, EOB published another hard-hitting Irish novel, Down by the River, which considers the troubled intersections of personal, state, and religious concerns.
Blackwell’s Online Bookshop. http://Bookshop.Blackwell.co.uk.

Biography

Birth and Family

15 December 1930

EOB was born in Tuamgraney, County Clare, the youngest of four surviving children.
Many standard sources give her birthdate as 1936 and some as 1932.
Eckley, Grace. Edna O’Brien. Bucknell University Press.
17