Edna O'Brien

Edna O´Brien was born in 1930 at Tuamgraney, Ireland.

O´Brien was the youngest of four children of a strict, religious family. Her father was an alcoholic man and his mother was a strong, controlling woman.

From 1941 to 1946 she was educated by the Sisters of Mercy, a circumstance that contributed to a suffocating childhood.

Fleeing from that situation, she went to Dublin where she graduated in pharmacy in 1950. In Ireland, she read such writers as Tolstoy, Thackeray, and F. Scott Fitzgerald while she worked as a chemist. In 1954, she married, against her parents' wishes, the Irish writer Ernest Gébler and the couple moved to London. They had two sons, Carlo (a writer) and Sasha Gebler, an architect, but the marriage was dissolved in 1964. Gébler died in 1998.

In London, she learned that James Joyce´s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was autobiographical, which made her realize that she wanted to write about herself: 'Unhappy houses are a very good incubation for stories', she said. In London she started to work as a reader for Hutchinson, where on the basis of her reports she was commissioned, for £50, to write a novel. She published her first book, The Country Girls, in 1960.

This was the first part of a trilogy of novels, later collected as The Country Girls Trilogy, which included The Lonely Girl (1962) and Girls in their Married Bliss (1964). Shortly after their publication, these books were banned and, in some cases burned, in her native country due to their frank portrayals of the sex lives of their characters. Her novel, A Pagan Place (1970), was about her repressive childhood, since her parents were vehemently against all things related to literature; particularly her mother strongly disapproved of her daughter's career as a writer.

O´Brien was a panel member for the first edition of the BBC´s Question Time in 1979. In 2017, she became the sole surviving member.

In 1980, she wrote a play, Virginia, about Virginia Woolf, and it was staged originally in Canada and subsequently in London and New York in 1985.

Other works include A Biography of James Joyce, published in 1999, and one of the poet Lord Byron, Byron in Love (2009). Ulster's Man of the Dark and House of Splendid Isolation (1994), her novel about a terrorist who goes on the run, marked a new phase in her writing career. Down by the River (1996) concerned an under-age rape victim who sought an abortion in England. In the Forest (2002) dealt with the real-life case of Brendan O'Donnell, who abducted and murdered a woman, her three-year-old son, and a priest, in rural Ireland.

As well as that, she wrote screenplays in order to adapt some of her works: I was happy here (1966), 3 into 2 won't Go (1969) and Zee and Co (1972).

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