Before Edna O’Brien, Irish female writers tended to come from the preserve of the “big house” or enjoyed the kind of privilege that made a life of writing possible. And by and large, their books dealt with genteel themes and conformed to recognisable genres and narrative forms.
When O’Brien’s first novel, The Country Girls, was published in 1960, all that changed. As her friend and peer Philip Roth remarked: “While Joyce, in Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist, was the first Irish Catholic to make his experience and surroundings recognisable, ‘the world of Nora Barnacle’ had to wait for the fiction of Edna O’Brien.”
