THIS year marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of Edna O’Brien’s novel The Country Girls, a book that daringly reflected life in rural Ireland and at the time shocked, angered yet captivated her local community.
It is timely so that the renowned author returns to East Clare this year for the Scariff Harbour Festival for a unique public interview.
Declan Kiberd, Professor of Anglo Irish Literature at University College Dublin, will talk to Edna about her life, times and works at Scariff Library on Saturday, July 31 at 3pm.
The Country Girls was the first of several works including novels, short stories and plays from Edna O’Brien. The prolific writer has had an extraordinary literary career with many works firmly rooted in the landscape in which she grew up.
Harry O’Meara of the Scariff Harbour Festival Committee described the upcoming event as significant, not just for the festival and County Clare but for a much wider audience.
“Of the many interviews in which Edna O’Brien has engaged over her lifetime all over the world, this is the first time she has accepted an invitation to do a public interview in her own native place. Now 50 years on from the publication of The Country Girls, this will give, among other things, a retrospective view of how much place and landscape have influenced her many writings,” he said.
By 1959, Edna O’Brien had moved to London having spent some time working in Dublin and attending evening classes at a Pharmaceutical College. Looking back to life in rural Ireland, she saw it as “narrow, religious, claustrophobic and punitive”. These aspects of 1950’s Ireland were strongly reflected in her early writings particularly in her trilogy The Country Girls, The Lonely Girl and Girls in their Married Bliss and her later book A Pagan Place.
In these and subsequent novels, O’Brien painted sharp, sometimes unflattering and often funny portraits of people whom locals would claim they could clearly identify.
Older people in Scariff, Tuamgraney and surrounding parishes still remember feelings of guilt and glee as they attempted to match certain characters in The Country Girls or A Pagan Place with real people they knew. As they turned the pages, it was revealed with disbelief that these characters, particularly women, were tormented by loss, loneliness, oppression and sex, matters that had not found public expression in rural Clare in the ’60s.
However, the world was changing. As The Country Girls was published, modern industrialisation in the shape of the new German Chipboard factory came to Scariff in 1959. Additional money allowed the men to consume pints at Johnny Moloney’s or Jimmy Jacko’s pubs before heading to the Astor Ballroom where the girls shyly waited and Brendan Bowyer and the Royal Showband hucklebucked a new generation into Scariff’s version of the swinging ’60s and the ink was hardly dry on The Country Girls.
Despite change in demographics and culture, physical trace elements in her writings still remain. The landscape of low hills circling Lough Derg is a constant. But Edna had been hugely influenced by the great Irish and international writers, particularly Joyce, Beckett, Chekhov and Tolstoy. Her non-fiction works include James and Nora, a study of James Joyce’s marriage to Nora Barnacle and a later biography of James Joyce in which she paints a picture of a highly complex man.
Women continued to be a common thread in her later novels, Time and Tide, The House of Splendid Isolation and The Mother of Invention but it is the richness and depth of the story that still has the greatest appeal for Edna. The most controversial novel since The Country Girls was In the Forest, a fictionalised depiction of the horrific murders by a young local man of a mother, her child and a priest in Cregg Wood, near Whitegate on the Clare/Galway border in 1994. Although accused by locals of insensitivity and greed, Edna felt compelled to write the novel because of her strong sense that fear and darkness still prevail in rural Ireland.
The daughter of Tuamgraney farmer, Michael O’Brien, and his wife Lena (Cleary), Edna went to boarding school at the Convent of Mercy, Loughrea. She married Ernest Gébler, an Irish-born writer of Czech extraction, whose novel The Plymouth Adventure was made into a film starring Spencer Tracy. They had two sons, Carlo and Sasha. Carlo, also a writer and based in Enniskillen in County Fermanagh, wrote a memoir Father & I based on diaries and documents kept by his father since the 1940s.
Edna is currently working on her autobiography, which is due to be published in 2011 with the working title of The Country Girl. In addition to the many accolades she has received throughout her lifetime, she was appointed Adjunct Professor of Creative Writing at UCD in 2006 where she shares a platform with Professor Declan Kiberd.
A Dublin native, Dr Kiberd has been a UCD faculty member since 1979 and counts the novelist John McGahern among his earliest teachers. He earned his doctorate degree in Oxford under the direction of Richard Ellmann, the biographer of Joyce, Yeats and Wilde. He takes up a new appointment in 2011 as Professor of Irish Studies and English at the University of Notre Dame in the USA.
The interview is free to the public, however, tickets are needed as seating is limited and will be available in advance from Scariff Library on 06 922983 or O’Meara’s Pharmacy on 061 921028. They will also be available on the day at the information stand on the Fair Green.