By 1969 five of her novels, branded obscene and pornographic, had been banned in her native Ireland. 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. If you write in the first person, which I often do, and if you have a slightly confessional voice—you know, rather than the epistle voice—it looks like that.
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