The book was written in three weeks, and O’Brien emerged as a writer who seemed to come from nowhere, producing lyrical prose whose tone and detail perfectly captured the inner lives of her characters and their desires, and which presaged the sexual revolution.
Literary scholars today see The Country Girls as profoundly influential: “Beautiful and raunchy, funny and haunting, The Country Girls is often cited as the quintessential story of Irish girlhood, but it is a novel that didn’t break the mold, it created it,” said Irish novelist Eimear McBride.
Published before O’Brien was 30, the novel was critically acclaimed in Britain and the United States but banned in Ireland. Her mother, who claimed the local priest had publicly burned the book, kept a copy but, the author recalls, redacted “in thick black ink” the passages she felt were satanic.
O’Brien seemed resigned and embarrassed that his early books had made him a social pariah in his native County Clare.
“I believe that the mental distraction of literature is healthy and invigorating,” O’Brien told the British newspaper The Guardian in 1965. “We are surrounded by pleasing, easy-to-read prose, but our prejudices are aroused by friction.”
O’Brien grew up in a young Catholic Ireland and had strong views about the role of women. abortionbirth control, divorce etc. In many of his works, O’Brien portrays characters who long to be free from “the constraints of their upbringing” but who often fall victim to their own desires and dreams.
She stressed that her work, which includes plays, screenplays and short stories, is not strictly autobiographical — she wrote a memoir called “Country Girl” in 2012 — but if her story needed inspiration, her life would have been a gold mine.
She sought romance, but her relationships were short-lived: in her late 70s, she told BBC Radio, “I don’t think I ever learned how to play the game. I still regret that I didn’t learn it the way I learned to dance.”
After a breakup in the 1980s, she returned to her only enduring relationship – the written word – and continued to write longhand manuscripts well into her late 80s.
Like her hero James Joyce, she chose to leave Ireland and write about it. Living most of her life in London, she became famous at a young age and helped define the “Swinging” Sixties and dragged the Seventies into the “Sagging.” She bought a large house in London’s bohemian Chelsea district, where she held legendary gatherings.
Guests at the party included Princess Margaret, Jane Fonda and Sean Connery, who was friends with the former first lady. Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis author Gore VidalShe didn’t deny the rumors of an affair with a Hollywood star Robert Mitchum.
One night, a drunk actor named Marlon Brando slept in her kitchen, and Paul McCartney once drove her home and sang lullabies to her children.
Ms. O’Brien is an ageless Celtic beauty, as many correspondents have described her as a woman with auburn hair, milky white skin and expressive grey-blue eyes.
Robert Gottlieb, Ms. O’Brien’s longtime editor at Alfred A. Knopf Publishing in New York, wrote that she was “a glorious woman…with her pale skin, magnificent red hair and exotic outfits, sheer skirts that reached her ankles, blouses of vibrant antique lace, and layers of jewelry, bracelets and beads. She dangled and she drifted.”
Eventually, she became afraid that this image would overshadow her work. “I don’t want to be remembered as a frivolous person who partied and had romantic relationships. That would be ridiculous,” she wrote. “I have written over 25 books.”
O’Brien’s works have always revolved around the pain and loneliness of his fate-driven protagonists, but in his mid- to late-career they have broadened their scope to explore political conflicts, including violence, in Ireland, the Balkans and Nigeria.
Maureen O’Connor, professor of English at University College Cork and an authority on O’Brien, called the author’s books “clear, wholesome and honest, yet stunningly lyrical and always vivid.”
“The rich variety of her voices is one of her distinctive qualities and is particularly powerful in her later works, where stories are told through characters young and old, male and female, from different classes and many nationalities,” O’Connor added in an email.
Josephine Edna O’Brien was born on 15 December 1930 in Tuamgraney, County Clare, the youngest of four children. Her father, a horse trader, squandered much of his inheritance on gambling and drink, and she and her mother lived in fear of his alcoholic rages.
Her imagination was fired by the glamour of life in East Clare, including the troupes of travelling actors that visited her village, and she attempted to write her first novel at the age of ten.
The following year, she left home to attend a Catholic boarding school in County Galway. At first, with a naive confidence, O’Brien hoped not just to become a nun but to become a saint. But that calling didn’t come to fruition: The nuns “hated” her writing talent, she said.
She went to Dublin at 18 to train as a pharmacist. She fell in love with the recently divorced Czech-Irish writer Ernest Gebler and eventually eloped. She said it was her “duty” to marry him after a group of men, including her father, brothers and a bishop, followed them to the Isle of Man. By that time, she was being pursued but not chaste. Gebler “had been a bit rough around the edges,” she said in an interview.
The couple had two sons and lived in County Wicklow in the 1950s before moving to London, but Ms O’Brien says it was not a happy marriage, made worse by her success in “Country Girls” which made her husband jealous. She left home and the couple were involved in a bitter custody battle that lasted two years.
After The Country Girls, she wrote sequels, Lonely Girls (1962) and Happily Married Girls (1964), which tell the story of the marriage and divorce of the protagonists Baba and Caithleen. These works were also banned in Ireland, along with her next four novels.
Her female protagonists try, often thwarted, to navigate misogyny and their own passions. In Ms. O’Brien’s world, liberation comes at a price: Early critics likened her lovesick heroes to lemmings searching for a cliff.
In “August Is a Wicked Month,” published in 1965, an estranged woman seeks pleasure on the French Riviera. She contracts a venereal disease and loses her son in an accident. The book is used as evidence against her in an unsuccessful divorce and child custody lawsuit.
O’Brien also wrote the screenplay for “Green Eyed Girl” (1964), based on “Lonely Little Girl,” and “X, Y & Zee” (1972), starring Elizabeth Taylor and Michael Caine as a couple whose marriage becomes a sadomasochistic battlefield.
In the 1980s, she took a break from writing for several years, during which she was plagued by a long, unsatisfied affair with an obscure British politician whom she dubbed “Lochinver” in her autobiography. “I was living on emotional scraps and fooling myself,” she wrote. Her finances were in shambles, and she was forced to sell her Chelsea mansion.
“I was a bit foolish with myself,” she told BBC Radio’s Desert Island Discs. “It was a lesson for me to never let a day go by that I didn’t fulfill my mission.”
O’Brien, now in her late 80s, traveled to Nigeria to research “Girl,” a novel about the kidnapping and sexual abuse of schoolgirls by Boko Haram militants. Shortly after the book’s publication in 2019, O’Brien won the David Cohen Literary Prize, which recognizes the lifetime achievement of British and Irish authors.
Coen Prize judge Mark Lawson wrote that O’Brien’s “literary talent, courage and influence are as evident in the novel published just last September as in his first book sixty years ago, charting a rare trajectory of brilliant consistency.”
She is survived by two sons, Carlo Gebler and Sasha Gebler. A complete list of survivors was not immediately available.
Ms. O’Brien had a villa on the picturesque Irish coast near Donegal, designed by her architect son Sasha, but sold it because the rooms were too big and sunny for writing. She also said she worried that if she returned to Ireland permanently, she would feel less Irish and it would hinder her work. She never lost her Irish accent, which seemed to grow stronger, though more languid, as she aged.
“I wish I’d stood up a bit more when I was younger,” O’Brien told the Financial Times in an interview when he was 86. “But all things considered, I’ve been pretty brave. You know, when you start off pretty scary, you have a lot of obstacles. … As for my inner self, I can say that, while I take death and decay and frailty for granted, I’m the happiest I’ve ever been. I’m full of darkness, but I’m also full of light, do you know what I mean?”
