ASixty years have passed since Edna O’Brien’s first novel, The Country Girls, defamed Ireland. This is the patriarchal oppression of the church and the state. The country’s most powerful priest has denounced the story of the growth of two teenage girls who were expelled from a convent school and sought freedom, adventure and romantic fulfillment in the big city, and insulted Irish women. He called Edna O’Brien “Renegade and ugly.” The zealous capture of a Protestant postmaster in a village near the home of Edna O’Brien’s parents in Western Ireland testifies to the strong atmosphere in the country at the time. She felt it was appropriate to chase down a naked writer who had embarrassed her family. When her mother died years later, Edna O’Brien found a copy of her debut on a pillow she had sent to her parents. Dedication and contemptuous words cast a shadow.

For the next four years, Emery McBride, the youngest British-Irish writer of two generations, began with “Fifteen-year-olds.” However, in the meantime, she is celebrated as a writer who, through the revolt against the state and religious oppression, gave voice to the ute.

The young writer had fled to London when he wrote his first novel on the comfort train. When she sees that words are always there and need to be brought to light from within, she likes to say that the book was written by herself within three weeks. Sometimes she thinks of Flaubert, O’Brien once said, confessing to her lover that she had only put in a paragraph of paper with three months of writing and reconstruction. When Flaubert was told that her poetic passion was with the cool form of an employee, she spoke with conviction. Amidst all the conversations about the socialized beautiful woman with celebrities from literature, drama, politics and society in fashionable London, Edna O’Brien as a single mother brings novels, plays, screenplays and stories that are rarely seen.

Lady or peasant woman?

When reading Edna O’Brien’s books the tension between conflicting assets is evident. She repeats the words tenderness, cruelty, fear, savagery, pain, and joy. This reflects the duality of her own personality, which to her origin is seen as the granddaughter of a beautiful woman on her father’s side and a small farmer on her mother’s side. The different characteristics of the two “fifteen-year-old” girls – one gentle, romantic and introverted, the other calculating and the outside world – can also be interpreted as the evil of one coin.

Edna O’Brien always draws from her own experience. Her ability to penetrate the emotional world of her characters, driven by unrealistic passions, with strategic insight, and her ability to describe their weaknesses has often been compared to Chekhov’s stories. In fact, she shows this gift most clearly in her short stories.