THE magnificent Edna O’Brien died last week. She was one of Ireland’s most talented writers — perhaps the most gifted female writer to be hounded out of Ireland in the 20th century. The role that London played in her career was integral, as sanctuary and the stimulus for her creative development, although this is rarely mentioned.

Edna O’Brien’s 1962 debut novel, The Country Girls, forever associated her with her country, its natural beauty and sexual repression. She related how it was written in a feverish three weeks on her arrival in London, as a farewell to Ireland. 

She described her first impressions: “I had never been outside Ireland and it was November when I arrived in England. I found everything so different, so alien. Waterloo Station was full of people who were nameless, faceless. There were wreaths on the Cenotaph for Remembrance Sunday, and I felt bewildered and lost — an outsider.”

This represents the experience of many thousands of Irish immigrants arriving off the mail train over the years, and particularly Irish women, for whom the great cities of Britain often provided refuge as well as the possibility of an independent life. From 1980 until the repeal of the 8th amendment, an estimated 170,000 women had travelled from Ireland to Britain in order to have safe, legal abortions. 

For most of her long life Edna O’Brien lived in London. The city provided the distance from which she could distill her early experience, the anonymity she needed to recreate herself as a writer and, crucially, the cultural stimulation to open up her horizons.

O’Brien went on to write 18 novels and 8 collections of short stories, multiple plays, screenplays and works of non-fiction. In the 1960s she quickly became a household name. She produced staggeringly brilliant evocations of the lives of women struggling to crawl out of the rigid misogyny of the post-war decades. 

Her influence on the lives of Irish women was immense if slow to materialise; her books were banned in Ireland, and even publicly burnt in one instance. The notoriously powerful Archbishop John McQuaid called O’Brien “a renegade and a dirty one.” Vilified by her countrymen and women alike, it only fuelled her determination to blow up the patriarchal restraints on women by going deeper into her own experience, holding nothing back. In retrospect, even more than giving Irish women permission to enjoy sex, O’Brien’s work dragged Irish women out the backward-facing hypocrisy of their Catholic brainwashing. 

In August Is A Wicked Month (1965), the first London book published after the Country Girls scandal had exploded, O’Brien depicted a woman seeking her own sexual pleasure. “She had been brought up to believe in punishment,” she wrote, “sin in a field and then the long awful spell in the Magdalen laundry scrubbing it out, down on her knees getting cleansed.” 

This is a staggering revelation for its time. As novelist Colm McCann wrote, Edna O’Brien was #MeToo-ing 50 years in advance of that movement.

Her influence went further than Ireland, and O’Brien entered the milieu of ’60s second wave feminism sweeping through London. She collaborated with Up The Junction author Nell Dunn on another groundbreaking book, Talking To Women: “Edna, 32; has 2 sons and has published 4 novels,” her section begins. The Guardian described this as: “One of the first books to address the complications of the female self fragmented by prescribed notions of what women’s creativity should or shouldn’t be.”

The lyricism of her writing style and the deep longing for the Other — which is her essential theme — often obscured the revolutionary in her work. Feminist writer Julia O’Faolain, writing in the Times, noted that: “Miss O’Brien’s sex-dazzled heroines continue to race like lemmings toward unhappiness.” But Clare Boylan argued in Becoming A Legend that O’Brien was one of the pioneers in introducing a theme of female desire, along with Margaret Atwood, Fay Weldon, Angela Carter and Marilyn French. Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch was written a decade after O’Brien’s incendiary first works. Greer said of her own book, “Women have somehow been separated from their libido, from their faculty of desire, from their sexuality.”

But Edna O’Brien’s life can be read as a manifesto for women’s rights to self-determination, and London provided the constructive framework for that, as it did for many thousands of immigrants. O’Brien brought up two sons as a single mother, worked hard at her craft to earn her own income, was arrested alongside her friend Vanessa Redgrave at a Trafalgar Square CND protest, was celebrated for the generosity of her “Champagne and Irish stew” house parties. She lived a stylish, clever, invested life amongst the other artists of a vibrant London scene.

Her literary range across the decades shows an unceasing pursuit of artistic challenge. In Night (1972) a sleepless woman, Mary Hooligan, is caretaking a house in Southwark and thinking back across her life. Reviewers compared O’Brien’s stream of consciousness with Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room. In her middle and later stages, O’Brien’s writing rendered the deepest experiences of isolation and subjectivity. 

Her last novel, Girl (2019) again explores a woman’s experience of her body as the site of her violent restriction. In this case, the protagonist is a Chibok schoolgirl kidnapped by Boko Haram. 

O’Brien’s legacy is in the depth of evocation her work creates: of psychologies, the tyranny of desire and the irredeemable losses underlying ordinary lives. It was O’Brien’s talent to evoke her themes with a heightened woman-with-a-capital-W sensibility. 

Sometimes this is what barred her from the full recognition of her genius, but her work will be read long after the critics have faded away, and she knew that. 

Bon Voyage, Edna, London misses you.