RHOSE #34 | “I better organize my demise in a sensible manner.” Celebrating the life of Edna O’Brien (1930-2024).

Philip Roth once said that O’Brien was one great part of the World, “brilliant, wild, soaring and indomitable”. (O’Hagan, 2024) She dwelled in her imagination from which she attempted to understand the human condition and where she found solace and a sense of belonging. “She lived inside her prose” (O’Hagan, 2024), one that she rarely ventured out and if so, with the sole purpose of upsurging against unfairness. Edna O’Brien was a literary pioneer, a champion of female agency and passions and the landmark in the Irish and international literary canon. An artist of contradictions, “an outrageous concoction what foreigners expect an Irish person to be: mellifluous, volatile, wanton” (O’Brien, 1987) she was also a female monk living a secluded life because as she admitted, otherwise she would not be able to write. Age liberated O’Brien from her partially self-imposed entrapment in the public persona and her anxious relationship with the public opinion. It has the power to enhance the possibility of women’s difference. Over time O’Brien became a living legend and a reference for other women writers.

In October 1970, Germaine Greer announced in The Female Eunuch that women should now transcend their culturally disciplined bodies and wrench them out of the obligatory constraints of marriage, the society and the family. In 1970 that Edna O’Brien had her photograph taken by a famous German photographer Horst Tappe later donated to The National Portrait Gallery by Terence Pepper in 2013. It showed O’Brien as pensive, confident in her natural yet simple beauty that she retained until her final years as made the long walk of terror and hope down the streets as she left her husband and then as she marched through life lived to the full, having consorted with the greatest men and women of the 20^th century. To this she always reposted, “My interior life is where I live to the full and is far more central to me.”

With Edna O’Brien’s death in July this year, we celebrate one of the greatest authors of Irish literature and a tenet voice of contemporary women’s writing. Defying gender relations, the societal norms and even age, Edna O’Brien will forever remain a reference for contemporary writers and a legend to guide us through the past, present and future moments.

Date: January 6, 2024
Schedule: 09:30
Venue: FLUL, Room C137