Edna o’brien: liberator and seductress  | thearticle

Edna O’Brien has died aged 93. There are great Irish writers of our times, but can any have had such an impact on English society and culture? My recently widowed mother, of Donegal stock, 

aged 44, brought in from the public library O’Brien’s breakthrough first novel, _ The Country Girls, _ in the early 1960s. I stole it from her bedside table and devoured it. Irish writers

until then had almost all been men  — Brendan Behan, James Joyce, maybe Conour Cruise O’Brien as a diplomat-writer — heavy, wordy, always with a hint of Jameson’s and Players untipped

cigarettes. Edna O’Brien was a woman, and she wrote about sexual intercourse three years before Philip Larkin said it had been invented in 1963. Young Irish women were not meant to have sex,

only babies, and O’Brien’s novels were denounced by Catholic bishops and priests in Ireland, some even burning copies. It shows just how backward and primitive De Valera’s Ireland was

before Ireland joined the European Community in 1973 and had its Enlightenment revolution. She wrote many other books – mainly fiction, plays, short stories, always with a lilting musical

voice. No other writer in no other country of her time did so much to liberate women or explain women to men. She wasn’t difficult to read. Her prose was tight, to the point, always carrying

the story along. Thus the great and good of the Nobel Literature prize committee — who like long words and unreadable novels, plays or poems — could not bring themselves to honour the

greatest woman novelist the British Isles produced in modern times. When she had done her day’s allotted words, she went out to enjoy herself in London literary and intellectual society. I

experienced her magnetism personally when I worked in the Foreign Office under Robin Cook, Tony Blair’s first and most consequential Foreign Secretary. I kept a daily diary when in

government and this entry from July 1998 perhaps conveys some of the impact Edna O’Brien had. The scene is George Weidenfeld’s Thamesside Cheyne Row flat in Chelsea. You stepped into Vienna

of 1930 – glittering silver bookcases going up to the ceiling. Roman and Greek statues, and the best of modern painting on the walls. That evening Robin Cook was the guest of honour:

Weidenfeld was the best connected global networker in London. The boss of the Axel Springer media empire in central Europe was there. A papal nuncio. University professors like Timothy

Garton Ash. My then French wife who found other French people to talk to. Weidenfeld was a cosmopolitan and not frightened of Europe as so many modern politicians and journalists in London

have been.  I recorded in my diary what happened as the evening wound down. “As we got up to go and were standing around to find our way out of the complex warren of rooms that Weidenfeld

has created in his Chelsea Embankment flat, there was a woman of an indeterminate age but well over fifty, with a curiously unlined face and a kind of death mask white make-up who was asking

in a soft Irish accent if she could get a taxi on Chelsea Embankment to get her as far as Sloane Square.   “I piped up and said we could take her.  She turned round to me and with her large

bosom butted me saying, “There’s no need, you know.  I just need to get to Sloane Square, I can get a taxi.”   “I insisted we could take her because I had realised that it was Edna O’Brien.

  ‘You’re Edna O’Brien, aren’t you?  I read all your books as a teenager and they turned me on to sex,’ I said with a giggle.   She went into immediate seduction overdrive and kept jabbing

me with her poitrine.  Nathalie came up and I said, ‘This is Edna O’Brien darling.  I have one of her books permanently in my bed,’  and Nathalie looked a bit perplexed, not quite locating

her in the running order of English literature but said of course we could take her as far as Sloane Square. In the car I couldn’t remember the name of a collection of short stories which I

had just got for 50p at a jumble sale at the children’s school and she rattled through them as we drove up through Chelsea across the King’s Road to her house.  There she insisted we should

all come in for a nightcap.  I was willing but Nathalie, who was tired from work, refused.   ‘Oh, come on.  I’ve some very good champagne in the fridge, some vintage champagne just for you,

Denis, come in and have a talk.’   I must check her age but the style and come-on was unmistakable and certainly unmistakeable to Nathalie who put her foot on the accelerator as we roared

away.  She protested that O’Brien was trying to seduce me which of course she was. But even Nathalie can recognise the difficulties of a love affair with someone old enough to be my mother

even now at my age and old enough to be my children’s great grandmother.”   A MESSAGE FROM THEARTICLE _We are the only publication that’s committed to covering every angle. We have an

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