In a 1970 interview with Barbara Bannon, O'Brien stated that she was "very much against literature as such but for the written word with color and life and air in it." Certainly there is color and life in her work. By 1969 five of her novels had been banned in her native Ireland, branded obscene and pornographic. These novels, and the ones to follow, often brutally and realistically chart a course of affairs where her heroines' emotional and sexual frustrations sometimes lead them into casual sex and liaisons with married men, young priests, and other women. What Stanley Kauffman calls her "lyrics of the loins" created a stir in some quarters, a full-blown scandal in others. How a nice, Irish Catholic convent girl could write so explicitly about sex and so often about despair and disappointment intrigued many critics and readers. The Irish censors, who in banning had promoted many other twentieth-century literary figures, turned their full force against Ireland's latest exile.
The confessional nature of much of O'Brien's prose has likewise led to speculation that little distance separates her work from her life. When asked by Ludovic Kennedy in 1976 how close her stories were to her own life, O'Brien answered: "They're quite close, but they're not as close as they seem.
This is a free page. This page contains 192 words. This
biography contains 6,415 words (approx. 21 pages at 300
words per page).
Read the rest of this Biography with our Edna O'Brien Access Pass.
