Edna O'Brien

O'Brien, Edna,

1932–, Irish writer, b. Twamgraney. After living in Dublin, she moved (1954) to London, where she still lives. Her constant theme and recurring setting, however, is Ireland. In richly sensual prose, O'Brien explores the dreams, failed marriages, doomed affairs, brief happiness, and ultimate disenchantment of individual women in her homeland's enclosed, sexually repressed culture. Her first seven books were once banned there. Her early works include a trilogy, The Country Girls (1960), The Lonely Girl (1962), and Girls in Their Married Bliss (1964). Among her subsequent novels are Casualties of Peace (1966), Johnny I Hardly Knew You (1977), and The High Road (1988). Her later novels, such as House of Splendid Isolation (1994), Down by the River (1997), and In the Forest (2002), continue to focus on the vicissitudes of women's lives while treating larger themes of the Irish experience. The semiautobiographical The Light of Evening (2006), her 20th novel, features a version of her mother as a central character. The Little Red Chairs (2016), her next novel, is partly set in Ireland but treats the wider world in the character of a Balkan war criminal. O'Brien also is known for her beautifully wrought short stories, which are collected in The Love Object (1968), A Scandalous Woman (1974), A Fanatic Heart (1984), Lantern Slides (1990), and Saints and Sinners (2011), and selected from those collections in The Love Object (2015). Other works include brief biographies of James Joyce (1999) and Byron (2009), essays, plays, and screenplays.

Bibliography

See her memoirs, Mother Ireland (1976) and Country Girl (2013); studies by G. Eckley (1974), B. Schrank (1998), A. Greenwood (2003), L. Colletta and M. O'Connor, ed. (2006), and K. Laing et al., ed. (2006).

Edna O'Brien

Edna O'Brien

O'Brien, Edna,

Bibliography

Edna O'Brien

Synonyms for Edna O'Brien

noun Irish writer (born in 1932)

Synonyms