martes, 17 de abril de 2018

Edna O'Brien

(1930)



© Bruce Weber
Edna O'Brien was born in Twamgraney, Co. Clare, and studied pharmacy in University College Dublin. In 1954 she moved to London and made her literary début with The Country Girls in 1960. The book and its two sequels caused outrage in Ireland and were banned by the Censorship Board. O'Brien has written bestselling novels, plays, children's books, essays, screenplays, and non-fiction about Ireland, often focusing on topical questions in relation to religion and gender. She has received numerous awards for her works, including a Kingsley Amis Award in 1962, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in 1990 for Lantern Slides. In 2006, Edna O'Brien was appointed adjunct professor of English Literature in University College Dublin.
Books

© Text Publishers, 2012

Byron in Love

Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2009

Everything about Lord George Gordon Byron was a paradox - insider and outsider, beautiful and deformed, serious and facetious, profligate but on occasion miserly, and possessed of a fierce intelligence trapped forever in a child's magic and malices. Edna O'Brien's exemplary biography of the rebel poet who continues to fascinate critics and readers alike focuses upon the diverse and colourful women in his life.

TRANSLATED INTO
Russian
RIGHTS CONTACT
Ed Victor, 
Ed Victor Ltd.
6 Bayley Street
Bedford Square, London WC1B 3HE
United Kingdom

T: 0044 2073044100
F: 0044 2073044111
E: ed@edvictor.com

@ Lit Edizioni Srl, 2014

Country Girl: A Memoir

Faber & Faber, 2012
Born in County Clare in 1930, in a town with no library and 27 pubs, O'Brien discovered literature in her twenties while working as a pharmacy's assistant in Dublin. Her illicit affair with a married man drove her out of Ireland and her controversial first novel, The Country Girls, published in 1960, cemented both her exile and her success. Her house in swinging London became a magnet for Hollywood giants, pop stars and literary titans. Now in her eighties, O'Brien gives her readers insight into a life devoted to writing and reading.
TRANSLATED INTO
Dutch, Italian
RIGHTS CONTACT
Ed Victor, 
Ed Victor Ltd.
6 Bayley Street
Bedford Square, London WC1B 3HE
United Kingdom

T: 0044 2073044100
F: 0044 2073044111
E: ed@edvictor.com

© Errata naturae editores, 2014

Girl with Green Eyes (The Lonely Girl)

Orion Books, 1962
Girl with Green Eyes continues the story of childhood friends Kate and Baba, now both twenty-one, as they navigate the rocky, sometimes treacherous pathways of urban life. With hearts as big as Dublin, and hopes as bright as new pennies, they move bravely and eagerly toward the future. Yet the two couldn't be more different. Kate toils in a grocery shop and lives out her romantic fantasies in books. Baba entertains more earthbound dreams. Their principles—and friendship—are tested when Kate meets a dashing married man, and discovers the exhilaration of passion...and the consequences of falling in love. A novel that combines the teeming ethos of big-city life with the ambitions and yearnings of two emerging young women, Girl with Green Eyes is a stellar achievement from one of Ireland's finest storytellers.
TRANSLATED INTO
Spanish
RIGHTS CONTACT
Ed Victor, 
Ed Victor Ltd.
6 Bayley Street
Bedford Square, London WC1B 3HE
United Kingdom

T: 0044 2073044100
F: 0044 2073044111
E: ed@edvictor.com

© De Bezige Bij

House of Splendid Isolation

Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1994
Josie, the ailing, elderly inhabitant of an Irish country mansion, dwells in the shadowy world of remembered pain and loneliness. McGreevy, the terrorist, reintroduces the possibility of compassion and tenderness, but there is an inevitably violent conclusion to their understanding as the police net closes. With extraordinary skill and empathy, Edna O'Brien shows two faces of a divided land: the yearnings of a woman whose youthful joy was broken and the intransigent idealism of her captor.
TRANSLATED INTO
Dutch
RIGHTS CONTACT
Kerry Glencorse, 
David Godwin Associates
55 Monmouth Street
London WC2H 9DG
United Kingdom

T: 0044 20 7240 9992
F: 0044 20 7395 6110
E: kerry@davidgodwinassociates.co.uk
W: www.davidgodwinassociates.co.uk

© Hoffmann & Campe

In the Forest

Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2002
Set in the west of Ireland, In the Forest is the story of a young man who shoots dead three people in a forest glade. The young man, Mich O'Kane, is an institutionalised criminal whose sexual fantasies eventually centre on Eily, an artist and single mother, who lives with her son Maddie. One day Mich pounces and orders Eily to drive them to the woods nearby...
TRANSLATED INTO
German
RIGHTS CONTACT
Kerry Glencorse, 
David Godwin Associates
55 Monmouth Street
London WC2H 9DG
United Kingdom

T: 0044 20 7240 9992
F: 0044 20 7395 6110
E: kerry@davidgodwinassociates.co.uk
W: www.davidgodwinassociates.co.uk

© Nefeli Publishers

James Joyce

Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1999
In her biography of Joyce, Edna O'Brien relates how she shares a love for the music and precision of words with the writer she has considered her model and inspiration throughout her career.
TRANSLATED INTO
Greek
RIGHTS CONTACT
Kerry Glencorse, 
David Godwin Associates
55 Monmouth Street
London WC2H 9DG
United Kingdom

T: 0044 20 7240 9992
F: 0044 20 7395 6110
E: kerry@davidgodwinassociates.co.uk
W: www.davidgodwinassociates.co.uk

© Kirmizi Kedi, 2015

Saints and Sinners

Faber & Faber, 2011
This collection of stories is characterised by an often heart-breaking grasp of people and their desires and contradictions: A woman walks the streets of Manhattan and contemplates with exquisite longing the precarious affair she has embarked on, amidst the grandeur and cacophony of the cityscape. A young Irish girl and her mother are thrilled to be invited to visit the glamorous Coughlan's but - for all the promise of their green gorgette, silver shoes and fancy dinner parties - they leave disappointed. An Irishman in north London retraces his life as a young lad with his mates digging the streets and dreaming of the apocryphal gold - an outsider both in Ireland and England, yet he carries the lodestar of his native land.
TRANSLATED INTO
Serbian, Bulgarian, Turkish
RIGHTS CONTACT
Ed Victor, 
Ed Victor Ltd.
6 Bayley Street
Bedford Square, London WC1B 3HE
United Kingdom

T: 0044 2073044100
F: 0044 2073044111
E: ed@edvictor.com

© Tyto Alba, 2008

The Country Girls Trilogy and Epilogue

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1986
The famous trilogy follows the lives of heroines Kate Brady and Baba Brennan as they struggle to find a place for themselves, first in Irish, then in British society. It comprises in one volume O'Brien's first three novels, published between 1960 and 1964, which combine an unusual frankness and sensitivity with beautiful prose. The Country Girls, O'Brien's literary début, tells the story of Caithleen and Baba's adolescence and coming of age. Growing up in Co. Clare, the two unlikely friends are brought closer together when Cait's mother drowns in a mysterious accident and her alcoholic father has to sell the family farm. Sent to a convent boarding school together, meek Cait quickly adapts and excels, while lively Baba suffers from boredom so severe, she devises a plan to get them both expelled. With the convent doors firmly shut behind them, the two girls' next stop is Dublin. Soon, they discover that the freedom the city has to offer young women comes at a price. Whereas pragmatic Baba plays the game with gusto, strategically choosing her partners, Cait remains a hopeless romantic, saving herself up for a 'Mr. Gentleman'. In the end, he will let her down, and Caithleen will have to learn to go her way alone. In The Lonely Girl, she discovers the exhilaration of passion - and the consequences of falling in love with a married man, a Protestant to boot. When the news reaches her drunkard father, he kidnaps her and locks her up. Once again, Cait's situation seems doomed. Girls in their Married Bliss rejoins the two friends in London years later. Caithleen has changed her name to neutral 'Kate', and is married to Eugene, the cause of all her troubles in the second part. Feeling increasingly alienated from him, she begins an affair. Eugene's terrible revenge for her unfaithfulness sends her back to her old friend Baba for support. But Baba, the bored trophy wife of builder Frank, has enough problems already without having to cure Kate of her self-pity and indefatigable romanticism. United in their dissatisfaction, the two women have to find a way to play out the tragicomedy of their married lives to its surprising conclusion.
TRANSLATED INTO
Lithuanian
RIGHTS CONTACT
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 
Attention: Subsidiary Rights Department
18 West 18th Street
New York, NY 10011
United States

T: 001 212 633 9385
E: rights@fsgbooks.com
W: http://us.macmillan.com

© Espasa Calpe S.A., 2009

The Light of Evening

Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2006
From her hospital bed in Dublin, the elderly Dilly awaits the visit of her daughter, Eleanora, from London. The epochs of her life pass before her: emigrating to America in the 1920s, a romantic liaison she had there, the destiny that brought her back to Ireland and her marriage. She also retraces Eleanora's precipitate marriage to a foreigner, and Dilly's heart-rending letters sent over the years in a determination to reclaim her daughter. Eleanora's visit does not prove to be the glad reunion that it might have been, and, in her sudden departure, she leaves behind the secret journal of their stormy relationship. The Light of Evening is a novel of dreams and broken dreams but, at its core, is the realisation that the bond between mother and child is unbreakable, stronger even than death.
TRANSLATED INTO
Greek, Spanish
RIGHTS CONTACT
Ed Victor, 
Ed Victor Ltd.
6 Bayley Street
Bedford Square, London WC1B 3HE
United Kingdom

T: 0044 2073044100
F: 0044 2073044111
E: ed@edvictor.com

© Naklada Ljevak, 2015

The Little Red Chairs

Faber&Faber, 2015
TRANSLATED INTO
Dutch, Estonian, Croatian
RIGHTS CONTACT
Ed Victor, 
Ed Victor Ltd.
6 Bayley Street
Bedford Square, London WC1B 3HE
United Kingdom

T: 0044 2073044100
F: 0044 2073044111
E: ed@edvictor.com

© Metaixmio

Wild Decembers

Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1999

When a young man arrives from Australia to claim his inheritance, he changes a small Irish town forever. Joseph Brennan sees Michael Bugler, the returned exile, as a threat. And for Breege, Joseph's younger sister, Bugler is an irresistible stranger to whose charms she must not succumb for fear of betraying her brother. A love-hate story on many levels, Wild Decembers explores the depth and darkness at the root of all ownership.






O'Brien and then-husband Ernest Gebler, whom she left after he choked her.



BIOGRAPHY


Irish novelist and short-story writer Edna O'Brien was born on 15 December 1930 in Tuamgraney, County Clare, Ireland.
She was educated at the Convent of Mercy in Loughrea, County Galway, and at the Pharmaceutical College of Ireland. She married the writer Ernest Gébler (later separated) and moved to London in 1959. One son is the writer Carlo Gébler, and the other the architect, Sasha Gébler. She read manuscripts for the publishers Hutchinson in London and was commissioned by them to write her first novel, The Country Girls (1960), the first book in a trilogy of novels (with The Lonely Girl in 1962 and Girls in Their Married Bliss in 1964) about two young convent-educated Irish girls who rebel against their upbringing and run away to Dublin and London. Her frank treatment of sexuality in these and subsequent novels brought her into conflict with the Catholic Church, and these and several other novels were banned by the Irish Censorship Board. 

Her other novels include A Pagan Place (1970), the story of a young girl growing up in rural Ireland, winner of the Yorkshire Post Book of the Year Award; Zee & Co, filmed as X, Y & Zee starring Elizabeth Taylor in 1972; Johnny I Hardly Knew You (1977), a story of love, murder and revenge; and, more recently, Time and Tide (1992), winner of a Writers' Guild Award (Best Fiction), the story of a young wife who faces a personal crisis when she leaves her husband and is forced to fight for the custody of her two sons. 

She is also the author of a trilogy of novels about modern Ireland: House of Splendid Isolation (1994), in which she writes about Irish nationalism and sectarian violence; Down by the River (1996), based on the true story of a young Irish rape victim forced to travel to England for a legal abortion; and Wild Decembers(1999), recently filmed by RTĒ and about a farmer, Joseph Brennan, and his sister, Breege, living in an isolated rural community. In the Forest (2002), is based on the true story of a disturbed and abused young man who murdered a young mother, her infant son and a Catholic priest in the west of Ireland in the early 1990s.
She has received several literary awards, among them the Los Angeles Times Book Prize (Fiction) in 1990 for Lantern Slides, a collection of short stories set primarily in Ireland. Other collections of short stories include The Love Object (1968), Mrs Reinhardt and Other Stories (1978) and A Scandalous Woman (1974). She also wrote Mother Ireland (1976), a travelogue with photographs by Fergus Bourke, and a biography of James Joyce, published in 1999.
She is also the author of several plays. Virginia (1981), based on the life and writings of Virginia Woolf, was performed at the Haymarket Theatre, London and Public Theater, New York; Flesh and Blood at the Almeida Theatre, London; and Triptych at the Magic Theatre, San Fransisco and Southwark Playhouse, London. Haunted premeried at The Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester in 2009.
Edna O'Brien's most recent books are the novel The Light of Evening (2006) and Byron in Love (2009). She is a member of Aosdána, an Irish organisation founded to promote the arts, and adjunct professor of English Literature at University College, Dublin.  She is also an honorary member of the American Academy of Letters.


O'Brien walking in the Lake District with her son Sasha Gebler.

 CRITICAL PERSPECTIVE


The main themes in Edna O’Brien’s fiction are Ireland and women.
Like James Joyce, whose work greatly inspired O’Brien, she has lived most of her adult life outside Ireland, exploring her home country from a more detached perspective. O’Brien’s most well-known and acclaimed work is her Country Girls trilogy – The Country Girls (1960), The Lonely Girl (1962; re-published as The Girl With Green Eyes, 1964) and Girls in Their Married Bliss (1964) – in which two rural Catholic girls rebel against the expectations of family and society. These and several subsequent novels were extremely controversial and initially banned in Ireland, due mainly to O’Brien’s explicit treatment of sexuality, but also to her critique of rural Irish Catholic morality. In particular, her emphasis – in these and later works – is on the oppressive, restrictive and often hypocritical expectations to which women were subjected, and the conflict and disillusionment involved in male-female relationships. Despite the humour that pervades the early work, O’Brien’s fiction is often quite bleak and despairing regarding the possibility of female characters attaining emotional fulfilment and happiness. These characters are often naive, immature and dependent on men – they gradually realise the importance of independence and emotional self-sufficiency, but struggle to free themselves from the Irish Catholic mores that are deeply rooted in their psychological make-up. O’Brien is acclaimed particularly for her authentic rendering of the intense emotional lives of her female characters, conveyed through sensuous and lyrical prose which poignantly evokes their emotional agonies.
The Country Girls trilogy was a groundbreaking literary work, for all the same reasons that it caused a storm of controversy. The trilogy takes as its subject matter, and thus gives credibility to, the inner lives of young Irish women and their rebellion against the Irish Catholic roles to which they were expected to conform, including a bold and unabashed depiction of their first sexual experiences. The protagonists are Kate and Baba, childhood friends from rural Catholic Ireland, whose story progresses gradually from naive hopes and romantic fairytale notions of love to eventual despair and devastation. Although the story is tragic, O’Brien combines its serious poignancy with ironic humour. In the first novel, The Country Girls, Kate and Baba escape their rural environment and stifling families by moving to Dublin, only to be brutally disillusioned by the reality of sexual and romantic relationships. In Lonely Girl / The Girl With Green Eyes, they move to London, while the ironic title of Girls in Their Married Bliss satirises the romantic ideals they grew up with, ending on a note of despair.
O’Brien’s next few novels, including August is a Wicked Month (1965), Johnny I Hardly Knew You (1977) and The High Road (1988) continue to offer detailed and evocative psychological portraits of women whose romantic ideals meet with disillusionment. A Pagan Place (1970) tells the story of a young girl growing up in rural Ireland who is seduced by a priest. It makes bold and effective use of a second-person narrative, which adds to the novel’s dark, disturbing tone. Terence Dawson comments on the development of O’Brien’s fiction, particularly her use of more experimental narrative techniques. Her use of humour, ‘so intrinsic to the early work, is gradually replaced by sharp and sometimes acid observations’, but even more noticeable is ‘the progress from the “realism” of the trilogy to the introverted monologues, reminiscences and reconstructions of her later work’ (Contemporary Novelists, ed. Henderson, 1991).
Time and Tide (1992) features Nell Steadman, a woman from rural Ireland who is now living in London and undergoing a painful divorce. Having felt oppressed and overpowered, firstly by her family and then by her husband, Nell is now struggling to free herself emotionally, while simultaneously undertaking a heart-rending custody battle for her two sons. Time and Tide evokes the raw and acute emotions of separation and of motherhood, offering a bleak picture of Nell’s increasing isolation and confusion. This novel, which does not have the humour of the earlier works, received mixed reviews, with some critics and readers finding Nell weak and self-pitying rather than a sympathetic heroine.
O’Brien’s recent fiction broadens its focus and engages more actively with contemporary social and political issues. The next three novels – House of Splendid Isolation (1994), Down By the River (1996) and Wild Decembers (1999) – are often grouped together as a trilogy that addresses various different aspects of modern Ireland. House of Splendid Isolation explores the complexities of The Troubles, featuring an elderly widow, living alone in a farmhouse, who develops an unlikely friendship with an IRA terrorist who holds her hostage in her own home as he hides from the law. As the two characters recount their life stories, and each finds in the other a sympathetic ear, O’Brien’s narrative skilfully sympathises with both sides of Ireland’s troubled history. Down By the River addresses one of Ireland’s modern controversies – that of abortion – while Wild Decembers has a rural West Country setting, depicting conflict between tradition and modernity through the story of Joseph, a traditional villager, his sister Breege, and Mick, an outsider who moves to the village. O’Brien alludes to wider issues in Irish society by poignantly showing the way in which tragedy is caused by Joseph’s fierce attachment to the past and rigid inability to compromise.
In the Forest (2002), which is based on a true story, caused controversy. It fictionalises the horrific 1994 murder in rural Ireland of a young mother, her three-year-old son and a Catholic priest, and many critics and readers felt that the event was too recent and traumatic to be used as fictional material. Nonetheless, it is a sophisticated novel, exploring the disturbed mind of the murderer and the sequence of abusive experiences that triggered his psychotic state. And herein lies the controversy, for although the novel does not absolve the killer of responsibility, it does examine the complexity of factors involved, placing him within the context of a society that contributed to his psychological destruction. As O’Brien herself comments: ‘Ostensibly it’s about a triple murder in a forest, but I believe that the novelist is the psychic and moral historian of his or her society’ (The Observer, 28 April 2002).
The Light of Evening (2006) returns to more familiar O’Brien territory, that of the loves, losses and disappointments of Irish women. It is framed around a strained mother-daughter relationship: Dilly lies dying in a rural Catholic hospital, awaiting a visit from her estranged daughter Eleanora. In a story that combines a first-person narrative of Dilly’s memories, and a third-person account of Eleanora’s rebellion and move to London, O’Brien captures the conflicting, ambivalent feelings between mothers and daughters, particularly the way in which dutiful Dilly simultaneously envies and disapproves of her daughter’s life: ‘Such is the wrath of the mothers, such is the cry of the mothers, such is the lamentation of the mothers.’
O’Brien has also been acclaimed for her non-fiction work. Mother Ireland (1976) is a collection of essays, partly autobiographical, which complement the fiction in offering insights into Irish culture and society. She has also written about some of her literary forebears and influences, including a play, Virginia (first staged in 1980), inspired by Virginia Woolf, and two works about James Joyce: a portrait of his marriage (1981) and a biography (1999). O’Brien has described her first reading of Joyce as her first ‘Damascene experience’ of literature (The Observer, 28 April 2002), and her own work, with its emphasis on the emotional life of ordinary individuals, has sometimes invited comparisons with Joyce’s. More recently, she has written another literary biography, Byron in Love (2009).
Elizabeth O’Reilly, 2010


Edna O'Brien

 AWARDS
2010
Irish Book of the Decade (Bord Gáis Energy Irish Book Awards)
2009
Bob Hughes Lifetime Achievement Award in Irish Literature
2006
Ulysses Medal (University College Dublin)
2001
Irish PEN Lifetime Achievement Award
1995
European Prize for Literature (European Association for the Arts)
1993
Writers' Guild Award (Best Fiction)
1991
Premio Grinzane Cavour (Italy)
1990
Los Angeles Times Book Prize (Fiction)
1970
Yorkshire Post Book Award (Book of the Year)
1962
Kingsley Amis Award


BIBLIOGRAPHY

Haunted
Byron in Love
The Light of Evening
In the Forest
Love's Lesson
Wild Decembers
James Joyce
Down by the River
House of Splendid Isolation
Time and Tide
Lantern Slides: Short Stories
On the Bone
The High Road
The Country Girls Trilogy
Tales for the Telling: Irish Folk and Fairy Stories
Vanishing Ireland
A Fanatic Heart: Selected Stories
The Rescue
Returning: Tales
A Christmas Treat
Virginia: a Play
The Dazzle
Some Irish Loving: a Selection
Mrs Reinhardt and Other Stories
Arabian Days
Johnny I Hardly Knew You
Mother Ireland
A Scandalous Woman: Stories
Night
Zee & Co
A Pagan Place
The Lotte Berk Book of Exercises
The Love Object
Casualties of Peace
August is a Wicked Month
Girls in Their Married Bliss
Girl with Green Eyes
The Lonely Girl
The Country Girls

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