Josephine Edna O'Brien (born 15 December 1930) is an Irish novelist, memoirist, playwright, poet and short-story writer. Elected to Aosdána by her fellow artists, she was honoured with the title Saoi in 2015 and the "UK and Ireland Nobel" David Cohen Prize in 2019, whilst France made her Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2021.
O'Brien's works often revolve around the inner feelings of women, and their problems in relating to men, and to society as a whole. Her first novel, The Country Girls (1960), is often credited with breaking silence on sexual matters and social issues during a repressive period in Ireland following the Second World War. The book was banned, burned and denounced from the pulpit. Faber and Faber published her memoir, Country Girl, in 2012. O'Brien lives in London.
O'Brien has been mentioned as a candidate for the Nobel Prize in literature. Philip Roth described her as "the most gifted woman now writing in English", while a former President of Ireland, Mary Robinson, cited her as "one of the great creative writers of her generation". Others to hail her as one of the greatest writers alive include John Banville, Michael Ondaatje and Sir Ian McKellen. O'Brien received the Irish PEN Award in 2001. Saints and Sinners won the 2011 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, the world's richest prize for a short-story collection.
Life and career
Josephine Edna O'Brien was born in 1930 to farmer Michael O'Brien and Lena Cleary at Tuamgraney, County Clare, Ireland, a place she would later describe as "fervid" and "enclosed". The family lived at "Drewsborough" (also "Drewsboro"), a "large two-storey house", which her mother kept in "semi-grandeur". Michael O'Brien, "whose family had seen wealthier times" as landowners, had inherited a "thousand acres or more" and "a fortune from rich uncles", but was a "profligate" hard-drinker who gambled away his inheritance, the land "sold off in bits ... or bartered to pay debts"; Lena "came from a poorer background". According to O'Brien, her mother was a strong, controlling woman who had emigrated temporarily to America, and worked for some time as a maid in Brooklyn, New York, for a well-off Irish-American family before returning to Ireland to raise her family. O'Brien was the youngest child of "a strict, religious family". From 1941 to 1946 she was educated by the Sisters of Mercy at the Convent of Mercy boarding school at Loughrea, County Galway – a circumstance that contributed to a "suffocating" childhood. "I rebelled against the coercive and stifling religion into which I was born and bred. It was very frightening and all pervasive. I'm glad it has gone." She was fond of a nun as she deeply missed her mother and tried to identify the nun with her. In 1950, having studied at night at pharmaceutical college and worked in a Dublin pharmacy during the day, O'Brien was awarded a licence as a pharmacist. In Ireland, she read such writers as Tolstoy, Thackeray, and F. Scott Fitzgerald.
In Dublin, O'Brien bought Introducing James Joyce, with an introduction written by T. S. Eliot, and said that when she learned that James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was autobiographical, it made her realise where she might turn, should she want to write herself. "Unhappy houses are a very good incubation for stories", she said. In London she started work as a reader for Hutchinson, where on the basis of her reports she was commissioned, for £50, to write a novel. She published her first book, The Country Girls, in 1960. This was the first part of a trilogy of novels (later collected as The Country Girls Trilogy), which included The Lonely Girl (1962) and Girls in Their Married Bliss (1964). Shortly after their publication, these books were banned and, in some cases burned, in her native country due to their frank portrayals of the sex lives of their characters. O'Brien herself was accused of "corrupting the minds of young women"; she later said: "I felt no fame. I was married. I had young children. All I could hear out of Ireland from my mother and anonymous letters was bile and odium and outrage."
In the 1960s, she was a patient of R.D. Laing: "I thought he might be able to help me. He couldn't do that – he was too mad himself – but he opened doors", she later said. Her novel, A Pagan Place (1970), was about her repressive childhood. Her parents were vehemently against all things related to literature; her mother strongly disapproved of her daughter's career as a writer. Once when her mother found a Seán O'Casey book in her daughter's possession, she tried to burn it.