Edna O'Brien

Standard Name: O'Brien, Edna
Birth Name: 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.
Black-and-white photo of Edna O'brien, December 1970. Seated, she is wearing an eclectic coat with different textual patterns and black fur sleeves and collar. Her hair is back in a relaxed bouffant updo.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Textual Features Toni Morrison
Set in Harlem in 1926,
Gates, Henry Louis, Jr, and Kwame Anthony Appiah, editors. Toni Morrison: Critical Perspectives Past and Present. Amistad, 1993.
36
this story presents the middle-aged marriage between Joe Trace, a door-to-door cosmetics salesman and perpetrator of a crime of passion, and Violet, a hairdresser who devotes her working life...
Textual Production Ling Shuhua
LS also wrote a short memoir about her encounters with Virginia Woolf , five pages long and in manuscript form. In it, she discusses watching Edna O'Brien 's Virginia: A Play and reflects on her...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Nell Dunn
Her interviewees are young women (the oldest is Edna O'Brien at thirty-two), many with small children, many trying to make it as writers or artists (two of the most trenchant interviews were given by O'Brien...

Timeline

No timeline events available.

Texts

O’Brien, Edna. Returning. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1982.
O’Brien, Edna. Saints and Sinners. Faber and Faber, 2011.
O’Brien, Edna. Seven Novels. Collins, 1978.
O’Brien, Edna, editor. Some Irish Loving. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1979.
O’Brien, Edna. The Country Girls. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1960.
O’Brien, Edna. The High Road. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1988.
O’Brien, Edna. The Little Red Chairs. Faber and Faber, 2015.
O’Brien, Edna. The Little Red Chairs. Faber and Faber, 2016.
O’Brien, Edna. The Lonely Girl. J. Cape, 1962.
O’Brien, Edna. The Love Object. J. Cape, 1968.
O’Brien, Edna. The Love Object: Selected Stories. Faber and Faber, 2013.
O’Brien, Edna. “The ogre of betrayal”. The Guardian, pp. Review 10 - 11.
O’Brien, Edna. Time and Tide. Viking, 1992.
O’Brien, Edna, and Richard Fitzgerald. Vanishing Ireland. J. Cape, 1986.
O’Brien, Edna. Virginia. Hogarth Press, 1981.
O’Brien, Edna. Wild Decembers. Houghton Mifflin, 1999.
O’Brien, Edna. Wild Decembers. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1999.
O’Brien, Edna. “Writers’ Rooms”. theguardian.com.
O’Brien, Edna. “Writers’ rooms”. The Guardian, p. Review 3.
O’Brien, Edna. Zee & Co. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971.