Works by
Edna O'Brien
(Writer)
[December 15, 1930 - ]

Biography/Memoir

• Mother Ireland (1976)
  Long before Frank McCourt (Angela's Ashes)and Nuala O'Faolain (Are You Somebody?) reminisced about the hardships and humor of their Irish childhoods, acclaimed novelist Edna O'Brien captured the soul of Ireland and its people in her 1976 memoir, Mother Ireland. Long out-of-print, Plume is reissuing this emerald gem so that it will take its rightful place among contemporary Irish classics. Mother Ireland includes seven essays seamlessly woven into an autobiographical tapestry. In her lyrical, sensuous voice, O'Brien describes growing up in rural County Clare, from her days in a convent school to her first kiss to her eventual migration to England. Weaving her own personal history with the history of Ireland, she effortlessly melds local customs and ancient lore with the fascinating people and events that shaped he young life. The result is a colorful and timeless narrative that perfectly captures the heart and soul of this harshly beautiful country. Rendered with grace and beauty, resonating with emotion and passion, Mother Ireland is an ode to a time, a place, and a people that one can leave, but never leave behind.

Fiction

• The Light of Evening (2006)
  In this contemporary story with universal resonance, Edna O'Brien delves deep into the intense relationship that exists between a mother and daughter who long for closeness yet remain eternally at odds.
  
  From her hospital bed in Dublin, the ailing Dilly Macready eagerly awaits a visit from her long-estranged daughter, Eleanora. Years before, Eleanora fled Ireland for London when her sensuous first novel caused a local scandal. Eleanora's peripatetic life since then has brought international fame but personal heartbreak in her failed quest for love. Always, her mother beseeches her to return home, sending letters that are priceless in their mix of love, guilt, and recrimination. For all her disapproval, Dilly herself knows something of Eleanora's need for freedom: as a young woman in the 1920s, Dilly left Ireland for a new life in New York City. O'Brien's marvelous cinematic portrait of New York in that era is a tour-de-force, filled with the clang and clatter of the city, the camaraderie of the working girls against their callous employers, and their fierce competition over handsome young men. But a lover's betrayal sent Dilly reeling back to Ireland to raise a family on a lovely old farm named Rusheen. It is Rusheen that still holds mother and daughter together.
  
  Yet Eleanora's visit to her mother’s sickbed does not prove to be the glad reunion that Dilly prayed for. And in her hasty departure, Eleanora leaves behind a secret journal of their stormy relationship -- a revelation that brings the novel to a shocking close.
  
  Brimming with the lyricism and earthy insight that are the hallmarks of Edna O'Brien's acclaimed fiction, The Light of Evening is a novel of dreams and attachments, lamentations and betrayals. At its core is the realization that the bond between mother and child is unbreakable, stronger even than death.

• In the Forest (2002)
  In the Forest returns to the countryside of western Ireland, the vivid backdrop of Edna O'Brien's best-selling Wild Decembers. Here O'Brien unravels a classic confrontation of evil and innocence centering on the young, troubled Michael O'Kane, christened by his neighbors "the Kindershrek," someone of whom small children are afraid. O'Kane loses his mother as a boy and by age ten is incarcerated in a juvenile detention center, an experience that leaves him scarred from abuse and worse, with the killing instinct buried within. A story based on actual events, In the Forest proceeds in a rush of hair-raising episodes and asks what will become of O'Kane's unwitting victims -- a radiant young woman, her little son, and a devout and trusting priest. Riveting, frightening, and brilliantly told, this intimate portrayal of both perpetrator and victims reminds us that anything can happen "outside the boundary of mother and child."

• Wild Decembers (1999)

• Down by the River (1996)
  Fourteen-year-old Mary MacNamara does not know the words for what her father did to her down by the river, but she knows nothing will ever be the same again. She lives in a small town in the rural West of Ireland where superstition and petty jealousies fester; where poverty and ignorance make people hard, bitter, and unforgiving. Mary will find scant justice or mercy among those in her community--even less among those called to adjudicate upon her case in a city far away as her private tragedy is dragged into the public arena, making her doubly a victim, prey to militant factions on all sides. Recalling the controversial 1992 "Miss X" case which drew international attention and provoked a nationwide crisis of conscience within Ireland, Down by the River combines passionately held principle and rich, evocative language and imagery to transform a dark drama of violence and suppressed emotions into a work of art that is universal, cathartic, and sublime.

• House of Splendid Isolation (1994)
  The author of A Fanatic Heart offers a timely novel that looks into the mind and heart of contemporary Ireland as an escaped IRA operative takes refuge in an abandoned house--until the occupant unexpectedly returns home.

• Time and Tide (1992)
  In a poignant, heart-felt exploration of one woman's struggle to be true to herself yet hold on to the things dearest to her, award-winning author Edna O'Brien tracks the life of Nell Steadman, an innocent "country girl" desperate to gain experience in whatever manner possible. Escaping from her overbearing family into an equally stifling marriage, Nell must fight for her freedom and custody of her children.
  
  Passionate, raw, and gorgeously written, Time and Tide is a profound exploration of the primal undertow of motherhood.

• The High Road (1988)
  O'Brien's fans have waited 11 years for this passionate and lyrical novel of lost and regained love, of tragedy and salvation. Anna, the yearning narrator, is tormented by a stormy past and escapes to a lush Spanish island hoping to forget a tempestuous love affair.

• Johnny I Hardly Knew You (1977)

• Night (1972)
  Edna O'Brien's classic novel Night takes us through one long, sleepless night with Mary Hooligan. From the center of her bed, "a four poster no less," Mary recalls her fertile past, from her childhood in the Irish countryside to the love affairs she has confronted since leaving for English shores. Wistful, wanton, this erotic reverie shows O'Brien to be one of the foremost heirs to modernism.

• Zee & Co. (1971)

• A Pagan Place (1970)
  A Pagan Place is Edna O'Brien's true novel of Ireland. Here she returns to that uniquely wonderful, terrible, peculiar place she once called home and writes not only of a life there--of the child becoming a woman--but of the Irish experience out of which that life arises--perhaps more pointedly than in any of her other works. This is the Ireland of country villages and barley fields, of druids in the woods, of unknown babies in the womb, of mischievous girls and Tans with guns. Ireland has marked Edna O'Brien's life and work with unmistakable color and depth, and here she recreates her homeland with a singular grace and intensity.

• The Love Object (1968)
  Love and its objects are the common elements in these eight stories: the nervous love of a country mother for her sophisticated, town-living daughter, the adoration of a mistress for her married lover and less orthodox affairs between women and their illusions.

• Casualties of Peace (1966)

• August Is a Wicked Month (1965)

The Country Girls Trilogy

• The Country Girls (1960)
  Meet Kate and Baba, two young Irish country girls who have spent their childhood together. As they leave the safety of their convent school in search of life and love in the big city, they struggle to maintain their somewhat tumultuous relationship. Kate, dreamy and romantic, yearns for true love, while Baba just wants to experience the life of a single girl. Although they set out to conquer the world together, as their lives take unexpected turns, Kate and Baba must ultimately learn to find their own way.

• Girl with Green Eyes (1962)
  The comic sequel to "The Country Girls", in which Caithleen Brady finds romance in Dublin - classy romance with the second Mr Gentleman. The story of Caithleen and Baba continues in "Girls in Their Married Bliss".

• Girls in Their Married Bliss (1964)
  Tearful Kate, bored with her grey husband in their grey stone house, is driven to indiscretions she can hardly handle without Baba`s help. But Baba has her own hands full with the passions of her rich and vulgar builder.
   

• The Country Girls Trilogy and Epilogue (1987)
  The Country Girls Trilogy and Epilogue is an absolutely engaging saga that is, thematically, about opposites - opposite dispositions and opposite views of life, the survivor versus the ungovernable romantic. It charts unflinchingly the pattern of life, for women, from the high spirits of youth to the chill of middle age, from hope to despair. It is both painful and hilarious.

Non-fiction

• Byron in Love: A Short, Daring Life (2009)
  Acclaimed biographer of James Joyce Edna O’Brien has written an intimate biography that suits her fiery and charismatic subject. She follows Byron from the dissipations of Regency London to the wilds of Albania and the Socratic pleasures of Greece and Turkey, culminating in his meteoric rise to fame at the age of twenty-four on the publication of Childe Harold. With her prismatic eye and novelistic style, O’Brien eerily captures the spirit of the man and creates an indelible portrait of Byron that explodes the Romantic myth. From his escapades with John Edleston, the fourteen-year-old Cambridge choir boy, to those with a galaxy of women that included his half-sister, his wife of one year, and the Italian countess who forsook her satyr-like husband for “the peer of England and its greatest poet,” Byron scandalized the world and inspires “Byronmania” to this day. Byron, as brilliantly rendered by O’Brien, is the poet as rebel, imaginative and lawless, and defiantly immortal.

• James Joyce (1999)
  In this volume in the "Lives" series, Edna O'Brien relates how she shares a love for the music and precision of words with the writer she has seen as guru for all of her life.

Plays

• Haunted (2009)
  'A beguiling memory play of such subtle and elusive beauty, you feel it might disintegrate if you were to put your finger on it. But the action forms a delicate tissue of loss and regret as the bewitching Hazel causes Mr Berry to reflect on the wife he has lost and the child he never had' - "Guardian". 'Combines youthful freshness with a wise, rich, wholly lived-in quality. O'Brien digs deep, like elaborate crochet-work where the needles lance to the heart' - "Daily Telegraph". 'An enchanting exploration of desire and regret' - "Observer". "Haunted" premiered at Manchester's Royal Exchange in 2009 and transfers to the Gaiety Theatre, Dublin, in February 2010 before a UK tour.

Poetry

• On the Bone (1989)

Short Stories

• Lantern Slides (1990)
  Lantern Slides is an aptly titled book: each story has a translucent yet vividly colored quality. Whether telling of people on holiday, people in love, or children struggling to understand their surroundings, the stories are subtle in their motive, but rich in understanding, creating a world of memory and desire no less physical in color, texture, and taste as our own. The characters in Lantern Slides all seek love, that "bulwark between life and death." In "Oft in the Stilly Night," the reader is a traveller who is told numerous stories about the inhabitants of a small town - the mad woman, the cheating husband, the ambitious young beauty: "Perhaps your own village is much the same, perhaps everywhere is, perhaps pity is a luxury and deliverance a thing of the past." Set primarily in Ireland, these stories relate a kind of beautiful despair, the sadness of those able to mourn without self-pity, and to hope without self-delusion. Edna O'Brien's language is poetic yet not abstract; the dilemmas of her characters are universal yet deeply personal. She portrays loss without descending into bleakness or cynicism, and she never dismisses the possibility of hope, of life - "tender, spectacular, all-embracing life" - which each of the characters struggles to capture.

• A Fanatic Heart: Selected Stories (1985)
  In these selections from twenty years of her best short fiction, Edna O’Brien pulls the reader into a woman’s experience. Her stories portray a young Irish girl’s view of obsessive love and its often wrenching pain, while tales of contemporary life show women who open themselves to sexuality, to disappointment, to madness. Throughout, there is always O’Brien’s voice—wondrous, despairing, moving—examining passionate subjects that lay bare the desire and needs that can be hidden in a woman’s heart.

• Returning (1982)
  From one of the greatest prose stylists of our time,his complete short stories, including 13 hitherto unpublished, brought together for the first time.

• Mrs Reinhardt and Other Stories (1978)

• A Scandalous Woman and Other Stories (1974)
  The eight short stories of this collection have a dual theme: Ireland - its people, its personality - and woman - woman betrayed, or sacrificed, innocence involuntarily lost, happiness stolen or mislaid.

Other

• Irish Women's Letters (1999) by Edna O'Brien and Laurence Flanagan

• Some Irish Loving: A Translation (1979)

See also:

• Biography - Edna O'Brien (2007)
  An article from: Contemporary Authors Online by Gale Reference Tea, Digital - HTML

• Edna O'Brien: A Biographical Essay (2003)
  From Gale's "Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 231, British Novelists since 1960, 4th Series", Digital - Download: PDF

• Edna O'Brien by (1999) Bernice Schrank

• Edna O'Brien (1975) by Grace Eckley