Banned And Burned: Edna O'Brien's The Country Girls - The Gloss Magazine
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Banned And Burned: Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls

Edna O’Brien, who died yesterday aged 93, had her books banned by the Irish censor and burned by priests in the 1960s. Maggie Armstrong examines The Country Girls with a new lens …

What was it about The Country Girls that so sorely provoked the authorities? Banned by the Irish censor upon its publication in 1960, branded a “smear on Irish womanhood” by the Archbishop and burned by a priest, Edna O’Brien’s debut novel thrust her into the extremes of literary persecution. Over 60 years since its publication the coming of age story of Cait and Baba is still as dewy fresh and surprising. Though modern readers might be disappointed if they were hoping to be shocked.

Enjoying the book now, it’s not obvious what all the fuss was about. Aside from maybe, allusion to lesbian awakenings in the elm grove, mention of a nun “getting friendly” with a gardener, and the “dirty note” that results in the girls’ expulsion from boarding school. It seems it was more a question of what O’Brien’s book suggested might happen that what actually did. It’s here lies her great skill as a writer and chronicler; and as Andrew O’Hagan has described her, “a master withholder”.

The real scandal is surely an abusive father, a workman looking for a kiss from a 14 year old and of course, Mr Gentleman’s untimely seduction. The Country Girls is so much more about grief, abandonment and the slow-dawning disillusionment of growing up than it is a work of smut. It was not, like Lady Chatterly’s Lover, a book that young ladies in the 1960s covered with another book if they wanted to read it on, say, a train (as this writer’s mother did).

Having eloped and moved to London, Edna O’Brien sat down to write her first novel in some Aisling jotters, writing furiously every day after she dropped her young boys to school. With her advance of fifty pounds, it took her three weeks, and cost her many tears to produce – though “they were good tears” as she later wrote in her memoir Country Girl.

“The words poured out of me and the pen above the paper was not moving fast enough so that I sometimes feared they would be lost forever…It had written itself and I was merely the messenger”.

O’Brien knew that her mother would disapprove – the portrayal of the hero’s mother is not kind – but could never have imagined that she would disown her. Having heard about her book, her mother wrote to her saying she “hoped and prayed that I was not going to bring ignominy and disgrace on my own people”.

After her mother’s death she found the book with offending passages struck out with black pen, while others in her small County Clare village heaped scorn on her family. “The postmistress…told my father that a fitting punishment would be for me to be kicked naked through the town”.

Persecution doesn’t just happen a person once, it builds up as accusation follows accusation, shaming begets shaming. When the first royalties cheque came in O’Brien had to endorse it then hand it to her husband Ernest Gebler, receiving only a small amount from it each week for housekeeping. In the court battle she fought to get custody of her two children her husband brought her novels as evidence in the witness stand. A journalist in Ireland, male, wrote in Hibernia, quoting her husband, that her “talent resided in her knickers”.

The Country Girls was the first of O’Brien’s six novels which were banned in the 1960s, followed quickly with The Lonely Girl and Girls in their Married Bliss. In December 1966, aged 36, she walked through Dublin airport with just the jackets of the five novels she had written to that date. The books had been seized. “I just lost five pounds,” an indigent O’Brien told a reporter.

While one priest, Father Peter Connolly, a professor of English in Maynooth tried to champion her novels, the intellectual group An Tuarim held a special public meeting to voice their reservations about the young offender, who another (male) writer had by now dismissed as a “nymphomaniac”. And there was that infamous – if not entirely corroborated – burning of her books by a parish priest in a place called Tuamgraney.

Some 18 novels on, O’Brien is a figure of freedom and a redoubtable author, using her voice to drive home the appalling capture of girls by Boko Harem (Girl) and sexual violence (The Little Red Cars).

While being cross-examined by her community in Limerick, one of the questions she was asked was whether she put much of her life into her books. To which she reportedly replied, “I have always thought that people’s interest in this side of a book is vulgar and speculative. What they feel at the moment they are reading it is the only important thing.”

This article was originally published in 2020.

Photograph via Curtis Brown.

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