Edna O’Brien (2017 [1960]) The Country Girls Trilogy.

Edna O’Brien claimed The Country Girls wrote itself. The best books often do. Indeed it’s a marvel and she is a marvellous writer. It’s easy to make the mistake of confusing her with Caithleen (Cait) Brady. The teenage protagonist growing into womanhood in rural, 1950s Tuamgraney, East Clare, and later Dublin, with a little help from her frenemy Baba Brennan.  

Write what you know. O’Brien/Cait knows the in and outs of every field and path through the village and what to expect from Bulldog the sheepdog and Hickey, who keeps the farm going and from her kind, gentle and beautiful mother, who made the terrible mistake of marrying a brute of a man that is her father.

Men rule the world. He father berates and beats her and her mother and pisses the money from the farm away. Men poke and prod and desire her such as the local shopkeeper and Mr Du Maurier, who courts her when she is fourteen. Locally, he’s known as Mr Gentleman as nobody could remember such a long-winded French name.

There’s more sex in a clip from The Benny Hill show than in The Country Girls. Yet on its publication there was book burnings Public denunciations and pronouncements made from the altar. No doubt some readers went to hell. But it was all good publicity.

Ireland might well be full of wife beaters, children beaters, old man trying to trick Cait into kissing her or worse. But the worse thing for the Catholic Church was Cait and Baba weren’t just virginal objects of desire.

After getting expelled from Convent School—three years passed without comment and in the marginalia—they are free not only to be desired but to desire. What they’re not really sure. Well, Baba is. It’s called a good time. For Cait it’s Mr Gentleman. Then someone from the pages of the books she reads.

For her characters and the author (by implication) to be accused of nymphomania by the curmudgeonly and deadly boring Irish writer Frank O’Connor should show us how far we’ve come. But, then, again, I guess not.

  Edna O’Brien died on 27 July 2024 at the age of 93. She was one of the greats. I’ll be reading more of her works. Women’s rights like the rights of the working class have taken a backwards step. It’s just dressed up differently. Read on.  

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0CVBVVGD6