Edna O'Brien

Josephine Edna O'Brien (15 December 1930 – 27 July 2024) was an Irish novelist, short-story writer and playwright, who was resident in the United Kingdom from the late-1950s. Her first seven novels were banned in Ireland on publication, but she found an appreciative audience in her adopted country and in the United States.

Edna O’Brien (2016)

Sarong nobelista (2015)

Quotes

• The vote, I thought, means nothing to women, we should be armed.
  • Girls in their Married Bliss (London: Jonathan Cape, 1964) p. 78

• Oh, God, who does not exist, you hate women, otherwise you'd have made them different. And Jesus, who snubbed your mother, you hate them more.
  • Girls in their Married Bliss (London: Jonathan Cape, 1964) p. 119

• [On the banning of (her then) four novels in Ireland] I believe that mental disturbance by literature is a healthy and invigorating thing. We have plenty of comfortable and easy prose all around us, but it's by abrasion that people's prejudices are aroused.
  • "Is 'August' a Wicked Book", The Guardian (8 October 1965), p. 5
  • Speaking in Dublin to promote her novel August Is a Wicked Month which was then on limited sale in the city's bookshops.

• Writers really live in the mind and in hotels of the soul.
  • Interviewed in Vogue (April 1985)

• It is increasingly clear that the fate of the universe will come to depend more and more on individuals as the bungling of bureaucracy permeates every corner of our existence.
  • New York Times Book Review (14 February 1993)

• I don't think I have ever learned the game of men and women. To this day I regret the fact that it's like a dance I couldn't learn.
  • From O'Brien's appearance on Desert Island Discs (BBC Radio, 14 January 2007), as quoted in "Edna O'Brien, groundbreaking Irish novelist, dies at 93", The Washington Post (28 July 2024).

Quotes about Edna O'Brien

• She has always ridden the passions as if they were a magnificent horse.
  • Anatole Broyard, in the New York Times, January 1, 1978

• (Tell us about your favorite short story.) “Old Wounds,” by Edna O’Brien, haunts me as though I’ve lived it.
  • Louise Erdrich interview (2016)