"Who's Afraid of Edna O'Brien?" asks an early interviewer in
"Conversations with Edna O'Brien." With over fifty years of
published novels, biographies, plays, telecasts, short stories, and
more, it is hard not to be intimidated by her. An acclaimed and
controversial Irish writer, O'Brien (b. 1932) saw her early works,
starting in 1960 with "The Country Girls," banned and burned in
Ireland, but often read in secret. Her contemporary work continues
to spark debates on the rigors and challenges of Catholic
conservatism and the struggle for women to make a place for
themselves in the world without anxiety and guilt. The raw nerve of
emotion at the heart of her lyrical prose provokes readers,
challenges politicians, and proves difficult for critics to place
her.
In these interviews, O'Brien finds her own critical voice and
moves interviewers away from a focus on her life as the "once
infamous Edna" toward a focus on her works. Parallels between Edna
O'Brien and her literary muse and mentor, James Joyce, are often
cited in interviews such as Phillip Roth's description of "The
Country Girls" as "rural Dubliners." While Joyce is the centerpiece
of O'Brien's literary pantheon, allusions to writers such as
Shakespeare, Chekhov, Beckett, and Woolf become a medium for her
critical voice. Conversations with contemporary writers Phillip
Roth and Glenn Patterson reveal Edna O'Brien's sense of herself as
a contemporary writer. The final interview included here, with BBC
personality William Crawley at Queen's University, Belfast, is a
synthesis of her acceptance and fame as an Irish writer and an
Irish woman and an affirmation of her literary authority.
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