Decades before Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels, the Irish writer Edna O’Brien — who died at 93 on July 27 — provided her own searing portraits of an oppressive, violent society seen through the prism of female friendship.
When we first meet them in 1960’s “The Country Girls,” Kate and Baba are teenagers, dreaming of a future beyond the confines of their rural Irish village and strict convent school.
Its sequels — “Girl With Green Eyes” (1962), and the ironically-titled “Girls in Their Married Bliss” (1964) — follow them through their first taste of womanhood in Dublin, then to London, where they struggle to reconcile their romantic fantasies with the frustrations of real marital life.
O’Brien was 29 when “The Country Girls” was published, living with two young sons and her then-husband, the writer Ernest Gébler, in a small house in a bleak south London suburb to which they’d moved, two years earlier, from Ireland.
The novel took her only three weeks to write, the words having “tumbled out,” as she recalled in her 2012 memoir, “Country Girl,” “like the oats on threshing day that tumble down the shaft, the hard pellets of oats funneled into bags and the chaff flying everywhere, getting into the men’s eyes and their having to shout to be heard above the noise of the machine.”Although tame by today’s social mores, and praised on its publication by the English press, “The Country Girls” — with its candid portrayal of female sexuality and extramarital romance — sent shock waves through Ireland, where it was denounced by the church and banned by the Irish censorship board as “indecent.” Copies were even publicly burned.
Persons:
Elena Ferrante’s, Edna O’Brien —, —, ” Kate, Baba, Bliss ”, O’Brien, Ernest Gébler, they’d
Locations:
Irish, Dublin, London, Ireland