With her wavy auburn hair, green eyes, alabaster skin and seductive Irish accent, Edna O’Brien was as glamorous as any of the women whose lives filled the pages of her bestselling novels.
But there was one crucial difference: a delicious aura of scandal and intrigue surrounded the writer, who died at the age of 93.
Until a very old age she remained a fascinating femme fatale about whom men, captivated by her beauty, tended to tell fantastic stories.
For women, she was celebrated not only for the vividness of her prose, but also for challenging conventions about their roles, and particularly about sex.
She gained instant fame – and notoriety – with her acclaimed 1960 coming-of-age story, The Country Girls, whose fearless honesty and casual bawdiness delighted critics but scandalized Catholic Ireland, where it was banned by censors for its sexually explicit content.
Irish novelist Edna O’Brien has died aged 93. For women, Edna was celebrated not only for the vividness of her prose but also for challenging conventions about their roles and their sex.
Until her old age she remained a fascinating femme fatale about whom men, captivated by her beauty, tended to tell fantastic stories, writes Richard Kay.
The Archbishop of Ireland condemned it and government ministers decreed that it had no place on the shelves of any “right-thinking family.”
Other critics went further. In his home town, the postmistress vociferated that the author of such rubbish should be kicked naked through the streets and that pirated copies should be ceremonially burned. “The priest rounded them up, along with their owners… and they burned these three copies in the church garden or grounds,” he recalled. “My mother told me… that several women fainted.”
Only later did O’Brien discover that his deeply religious mother had hidden her own copy after erasing any offending words with black ink.
The book, which he wrote in just three weeks, transformed the life of O’Brien, who had left school to work behind a pharmacy counter.
In London she became an overnight literary success, but in her native Ireland she was considered a national pariah.
However, the moral hysteria that followed the book’s appearance meant that both it and its author became era-defining symbols of the struggle to liberalise Ireland’s ultra-conservative and institutionally misogynistic post-war society.
Her career spanned more than 60 years, with her final novel, Girl, published in 2019. And while she was celebrated for the courage and elegance of her writing, she was equally renowned for her love life. In a memoir published in 2012, she told how she lost her virginity to a handsome journalist while training as a pharmacist in Dublin and moved in with her future husband – who, inconveniently, was married to someone else – six weeks after meeting him.
Her marriage did not survive her success and she was forced to fight a long and bitter custody battle over her two children.
She is famous for her relationships with Hollywood star Robert Mitchum and singer Bryan Ferry, but she turned down an offer from a bewildered Richard Burton. “He couldn’t understand why I didn’t want to go into the bedroom,” she said.
She had no such qualms about the tough-guy actor Mitchum, who would tell the attractive O’Brien: “I bet you wish I was Robert Taylor since you’ve never had white peaches.” As Edna, then 81, wrote of their first meeting: “It was clear he was going to take me home, regardless of my situation.”
Sure enough, he nodded to her and said, “Come on, baby,” and they went home to O’Brien’s little house in Putney. There, she recalled, “we danced all the way to the little bedroom… with all the shyness of strangers in love at saccharine songs.”
There was an affair with former Labour MP, US ambassador and television presenter John Freeman, whose other extramarital conquests included 1960s cabinet minister Barbara Castle (like O’Brien, a fiery redhead).
Hurt by the end of their relationship, she took revenge with her 1968 short story The Love Object. The object in question was a thinly disguised Freeman hosting the BBC’s Face to Face interviews. In it, she wrote how he “jokingly” announced that their relationship had to end while they were making love.
He also mischievously noted that Freeman’s character always folded his pants with geometric precision before jumping into bed.
He was not the only prominent politician O’Brien was linked to, and although she never revealed his name (he was also married), she once came close to doing so.
Recounting how she had been at a cocktail party at the US ambassador’s residence in Regent’s Park, she recalled how she had been mistaken for a cloakroom attendant before adding: “And then a man I once loved, who must remain anonymous, killed me.”
Their long-standing relationship developed during the 1980s.
Not all of her encounters ended in romance. At the height of her beauty, she was abandoned by American folk singer Richie Havens, who opened the Woodstock rock festival in 1969. All he left her was a cryptic note.
In a radio interview with pop star Jarvis Cocker, O’Brien revealed how he met Havens at a party. “I was a bit taken by him,” he recalled. “I get quite excited when I admire someone, so in short, it’s not a secret.
‘He invited me to meet him the following night at this hotel near Hyde Park Corner.
‘I went to the hotel and the concierge handed me a letter that remained engraved in my mind. It was one of life’s slights.
‘He said, “I can’t be here. I’ve made two promises, both to happen on the same mountain.” Long story short, I never saw Richie Havens again.
Edna had a famous romance with singer Bryan Ferry…
…and Hollywood star Robert Mitchum
Even in her late 70s and 80s, O’Brien, who was given an honorary damehood for her contribution to literature, exuded a flirtatiousness that many admirers found irresistible.
Her bohemian house parties were famous for the celebrities who attended them: Sean Connery, Michael Caine, Princess Margaret, Marianne Faithfull and Paul McCartney, who wrote a song for her. Marlon Brando stayed overnight, although she always insisted that the encounter was chastely innocent.
But while, like her literary hero James Joyce, Edna O’Brien had to go into exile to find her identity as a writer, her spirit never left Ireland. In her memoirs, Country Girl, she described herself as a woman of two faces: bold and enterprising on the one hand, sensitive and vulnerable on the other.
As critics have said, this sense of human frailty and her lucid style made her more than two dozen novels, short stories, poems, screenplays and memoirs so compelling.
Edna O’Brien, the youngest of four children, was born into a staunchly Catholic family in County Clare and never lost her western Irish accent.
Her father was a drunk and a compulsive gambler, and she grew up afraid of his alcoholic rages. She recalled that he would accuse her mother of hiding money he wanted for drinking. Pointing a revolver in the faces of his wife and son, he vowed “mayhem and carnage upon us all.”
His wife implored him to put down the gun, but he fired. “I thought we were dead and it seemed strange to me that we were enveloped in burning smoke,” Edna recalls. “The bullet missed us and went into the door frame, where the white paint was crumbling and falling off in small pieces.”
Her mother had an extreme religious devotion: “There were morning prayers, evening prayers, vespers, supplications and contrition, psalms and verses,” Edna noted.
‘There were exhortations about pride, vanity, unclean pleasures, the deformity of our sins… the flames of hell seemed as real as the peat that burned in the fire.’
His mother, he said, demanded that her children be immaculate. “And not only on the outside, but also in their souls.”
‘My father never held a grudge against me, but she could be very critical. When I was a child, when I fell in love, when I had sexual desires… she was against all of that.’
To escape this harrowing upbringing, she sought refuge in the countryside, to daydream and write imaginary stories in which, she later said, “the words just ran away from me.”
After leaving school, she moved to Dublin to train as a pharmacist, although she spent her free time browsing the city’s bookshops. There she met Ernest Gebler, a failed Czech-Irish writer twenty years her senior, with whom she immediately fell in love.
Upon learning of his daughter’s “transgressions,” her father arrived at Gebler’s home, accompanied by a monk, determined to retrieve Edna and “lock her up.”
The couple fled to the Isle of Man, where they took refuge in the home of the writer JP Donleavy, but her father and his monastic companion followed them. Donleavy broke up the ensuing quarrel and her father returned, without her, to Ireland.
In 1952, the couple married and settled in London, where they raised two sons, Sasha and Carlo.
The marriage did not survive, however. O’Brien realised that he had traded the strictures of his religious upbringing for an equally harsh domestic regime. Gebler was jealous of his wife’s literary abilities. When The Country Girls, for which he was paid £50, was published, he scowled at her: “You can write and I’ll never forgive you.”
The book described the adventures of two girls from rural backgrounds who move to Dublin in search of romance. Both characters were based on her and it was a huge success. Shortly afterwards, O’Brien left. Her husband called her a “vain monster, devoid of all human traits.” It took her three years to gain custody of her children.
She, meanwhile, reinvented herself as a hostess in then-vibrant London and mingled with glamorous literary figures both there and in New York, where her circle included Jackie Kennedy, Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal and RD Laing, the psychiatrist with whom she took LSD and suffered a terrifying ‘trip’.
It led to a prolonged, chemically induced crisis. “I felt incapacitated and powerless,” she said. But it had a positive side effect: the bad trip cured her of her tendency to fall for cruel, authoritarian men.
Although she never remarried, she admitted to having a weakness for unsuitable men.
Her ideal date, she said, was “going out with the man I love, who bought me champagne, who didn’t complain about the price… and didn’t tell me how much he loved his wife.”