Mourners have gathered to remember the ‘revolutionary’ Irish writer Edna O’Brien as her funeral saw her carried by boat across Lough Derg in County Clare today.
O’Brien’s funeral mass was attended by Ireland’s President Michael D Higgins and actor Stephen Rea as well as the novelist’s family and friends today.
Her agent announced her sad death aged 93 last month and was met by a wave of tributes remembering O’Brien’s bold career after her books’ daring themes sparked controversy.
O’Brien’s career also saw the likes of Elizabeth Taylor and Michael Caine star in movies based on her novels and she also answered the very first question on BBC’s Question Time in 1979.
Remembered as a ‘revolutionary intervention in Irish fiction’, her loved ones gave readings and paid tribute during the service at St Joseph’s Church in her native Tuamgraney, County Clare on Saturday.
Mourners have gathered to remember the ‘revolutionary’ Irish writer Edna O’Brien as her funeral saw her carried by boat across Lough Derg today
Her agent announced her sad death aged 93 last month and was met by a wave of tributes remembering O’Brien’s bold career after her books’ daring themes sparked controversy. She is seen in 2019
The boat carried the author’s body from Mountshannon to Holy Island in County Clare
Actor Stephen Rea (second right) was among the famous faces in attendance for the service
Remembered as a ‘revolutionary intervention in Irish fiction’, her loved ones gave readings and paid tribute during the service
O’Brien, a novelist, short story writer, memoirist, poet and playwright, died aged 93 last month after a long illness.
The funeral mass was also attended by Independent Clare TD Michael McNamara and Commandant Claire Mortimer, who represented Taoiseach Simon Harris and Tanaiste Micheal Martin.
Higgins was joined by his wife Sabina Coyne, who appeared emotional throughout the service.
During the procession of symbols, family members and friends laid items which held significance for O’Brien.
Her grandson Oscar presented the Irish author’s French Legion of Honour to represent a ‘lifetime of extraordinary achievement’, which included an honorary damehood and a Torc of the Saoi, the highest honour that can be awarded by Aosdana, an Irish association of elite artists.
Flowers from the garden of her childhood home, Drewsborough House, were also offered.
Other items included a Buddha statue offered by her niece, to symbolise that O’Brien was a ‘deeply spiritual woman whose curiosity and open heart led her to many faiths throughout her lifetime’, including Buddhism.
Her Irish literary inspirations were honoured by a friend who carried a copy of James Joyce’s Ulysses, while another presented a portrait of the late author Samuel Beckett, a friend of O’Brien.
Her son Marcus Gebler told mourners the purpose of his mother’s writing was to ‘illuminate, inspire, give courage’ to those who struggled to speak out.
He said: ‘In the last week I’ve been moved and overwhelmed by the tributes and affection for our mother from so many different people in so many countries.
‘For many writers, it is their first book that is their best, and they never quite live up to that initial curated distillation of their own life.
‘But in our mother’s case, her development as a writer was an arc continually ascending from the lives of young women in 1940s Ireland, through age, experience and suffering, to 1990s Bosnia or Nigeria in 2014.’
Her son Marcus Gebler told mourners the purpose of his mother’s writing was to ‘illuminate, inspire, give courage’ to those who struggled to speak out
Pictured: O’Brien’s wicker coffin being lowered into a small boat to carry her body across Lough Derg
St. Caimin’s and Brigid’s church is seen in the distance on Holy Island in County Clare
Pictured: The procession of O’Brien’s loved ones follows her coffin to the church
Though O’Brien’s career was forged in the bustling streets of London, she drew most of her material from her formative years in Ireland
O’Brien found literary stardom and notoriety when her first novel, The Country Girls, was published in 1960
On the purpose of her writing, he added: ‘I believe in her case, it has been and will remain, to illuminate, inspire, give courage to and speak for those who are rendered dumb.’
Mr Gebler also read a poem that he wrote for his mother, which received a round of applause.
He became emotional as he finished by recalling what a doctor told him after his son Oscar was born, saying: ‘The most important thing you can do is to give him love as much as possible and all the time, and that is what we got from her.’
O’Brien’s friend, Scottish novelist Andrew O’Hagan, paid tribute to her legacy, saying she changed the perception of Irish female writers.
He said: ‘We’ve heard a lot in the last two weeks about Edna’s revolutionary intervention in Irish fiction, her opening up of the novel to the truths of desire and the complexities of interior female complexity.
‘But we must remember, as we celebrate her now, the hard road she had to navigate, even amongst her heroes.
‘”Men are governed by lines of intellect”, James Joyce wrote, “Women by curves of emotion”.
‘But Edna made it her task on an international stage both to embody and to defy that thought, marrying the intellectual to the sensual, coupling the emotional and the thoughtful, raising the bar on common experience and on inheritance, our pride of worth.’
O’Brien pictured with Queen Camilla, Antonia Fraser and Judy Dench in 2021
Actors Michael Caine and Elizabeth Taylor in a scene from the 1972 film X, Y and Zee, based on one of O’Brien’s books
Paying tribute to the author, publishing house Faber said she was ‘one of the greatest writers of our age’
O’Hagan spoke about ‘how funny’ she was, saying: ‘Her comic engine was always turning, even, or especially, in the midst of of anxiety – the comic engine, along with those other great turbines of creativity, outrage, ambition.
‘But at the centre of it all was a talent so singular that nothing could countermand it, nor age, nor illness, or lack of stamina.
‘She lived inside her prose like no writer I’ve ever known. Her gifts were both solid and ethereal, like the sprites in her favourite play, A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
‘Yet they were rooted in the history and the byways of Ireland, which was forever the landscape of her imagination, the seedbed of her writing and her soul.’
Among the songs performed during the service was the hymn The Lord’s my Shepherd, the traditional Irish song Danny Boy and a rendition of An Irish Blessing to close the service.
O’Brien’s remains were taken to St Joseph’s Church on Friday for the reposal and she was buried on Holy Island after the funeral service.
The writer was best known for her portrayal of women’s lives against repressive expectations of Irish society.
O’Brien was born in Ireland in 1930 on a farm in County Clare to her parents Lena and Michael
In a flurry of creativity, O’Brien wrote The Country Girls in just three weeks
O’Brien on The Magic Box talk show in 1967
O’Brien was born in Catholic Ireland in 1930 on a farm in Tuamgraney, County Clare, the youngest child of Michael O’Brien and Lena Cleary.
She was a quiet child but very observant and was always inclined to write on little scraps of paper torn out of her copybook.
From 1941 to 1946 she went to a school run by the Sisters of Mercy in Galway which she once described as: ‘No education, a rich chaotic education.’
As a young woman, O’Brien moved to Dublin and worked as a trainee chemist, and contributed to Irish newspapers with nature pieces.
It was there, aged 22, that she met Ernest Gebler in a bar on Henry Street through a mutual friend.
He was an author, intellect, 16 years her senior and he had been married before. When she first went to his house, in Lake Park, County Wicklow, O’Brien described it as like being in a story. ‘There was a first wife, rooms full of her clothes, oil paintings, a coffee pot. I had never seen a coffee pot before.’
O’Brien fell for him quickly, meeting in December and eloping with him as the daffodils were coming out in March.
‘Had there been time for a courtship,’ she said, ‘I might have seen some of the qualities that later came to the fore.’
They married in 1954 and had two sons, Carlo and Sasha. The couple moved to London and lived in suburbia in Wimbledon before their marriage ended in 1964.
In England’s capital, O’Brien found work with a publishing company, reading novels and writing book reports.
It was on the strength of those book reports that her boss Iain Hamilton and Blanche Knopf, of American publishing giant Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., commissioned her to write a novel, paying her £25 each.
In a flurry of creativity, O’Brien wrote The Country Girls in just three weeks.
Her husband, Ernest Gébler, was also a writer and though he had already achieved literary success in the US, he was jealous of his young wife’s abilities.
He appeared at breakfast in their London home one morning holding a manuscript copy of the novel, The Country Girls, in his hand.
‘You can write,’ he said. ‘And I will never forgive you.’
O’Brien’s career as a writer soon eclipsed his. Gébler later claimed that he was the writer of her early books in a mentoring capacity. It was a strain that broke the family up.
Their marriage was unhappy and the divorce was messy involving a bitter custody battle over the children, which O’Brien eventually won.
O’Brien had left the marriage ‘in a big hurry’ taking the boys with her.
However, she agreed to Gébler’s request that his sons should come to stay with him. When she dropped them off, they ran inside and he said: ‘Thank you, Edna, you have just legally deserted them.’
In the courtroom fight to get her sons back, extracts from her fourth novel August Is A Wicked Month were used as evidence against her to disparage her character.
In the years after her divorce, as a glamorous and successful author in the mid-60s, O’Brien threw parties in her house every Saturday night, attended by the likes of Judy Garland, Paul McCartney, and Princess Margaret
Sir Ian Mckellen and O’Brien pictured together at the 1992 Olivier Awards
Ed Victor and O’Brien pictured together in 2010 celebrating the 40th anniversary of the founding of the agency at the Saatchi Gallery
O’Brien and John McGahern at The South Bank Show Awards in London in 2006
O’Brien pictured in 2016 on stage at the Letters Live event in London
Though O’Brien’s career was forged in London, she drew most of her material from her formative years in Ireland.
Her first novel, The Country Girls, was published in 1960 and became part of a trilogy that was banned and burned in Ireland for their references to sex and social issues.
It even mortified her own mother. After her mother’s death, O’Brien found her copy of the book with all the offending words inked out.
The local postmistress told her father that she deserved to ‘be kicked naked through the town’ and in her village O’Brien said people would draw back behind a window curtain if she went up the street – as if she was a Jezebel.
The scandal it caused made other Irish writers of the day extremely envious, as ‘to be banned was a hot ticket to fame and recognition’.
After the reaction to her first novel, O’Brien said she was glad not to be living in Ireland. She believed that exile and separation were both very good and very essential for her to have the inner strength to write her following novels.
In the years after her divorce, as a glamorous and successful author in the mid-60s, O’Brien threw parties in her house every Saturday night, attended by the likes of Judy Garland, Paul McCartney, and Princess Margaret.
‘How I came to know all the people who came to the parties to this day baffles me,’ she said in a 2012 interview.
‘I was mad for life. I thought mistakenly that parties were the ticket to life.’
O’Brien had many friends and a few ‘flames’, including an affair with an unnamed British politician, though she never married again.
She was a patient of RD Laing, the Scottish psychiatrist, in the 70s and asked to undergo an LSD trip under his guidance. She described the LSD trip as ‘disturbing beyond words’ saying: ‘It deepened my already dark self and it deepened my writing.’
Through all her years of parties as a cosmopolitan socialite, she was always writing.
‘Hope eternal’ was what she called her habit of carrying sheets of paper and a pen on her in case inspiration struck.
Although it was the opposition to her early books that somewhat defined Edna O’Brien’s career, it is the longevity of her career, spanning over six decades, that gives it its permanence.
In September 1979, she appeared on the first episode of the BBC topical debate programme Question Time, joining the panel of guests including Labour MP Michael Foot, Conservative politician Teddy Taylor and the Archbishop of Liverpool Derek Worlock.
It was at a time when The Troubles plagued Ireland. IRA attacks were rife and tensions were high. The late Queen’s cousin, Lord Louis Mountbatten, was killed in County Sligo when an IRA bomb was placed on his fishing boat, one month before O’Brien appeared on Question Time.
O’Brien answered the first ever question on the show, asked by audience member and teacher Ms Charlton, ‘To what extent do you consider the forthcoming visit of the Pope to Ireland will help towards peace and reconciliation? Would a visit to Ulster have been of any value?’
To which O’Brien replied: ‘Well, I think it high time that Ireland had a miracle. I believe there was one at Knock a hundred years ago, so there might be a repetition.
‘I think the Pope’s visit is very good, certainly as a gesture and as a journey and I think if he were to go to the north of Ireland it would be a tremendous strength to the people there, both Catholic and Protestant. I think they would be impressed by it.
‘I don’t think, however, that anything could happen in the two days that he is there but I would hope that if he went it might enjoin the British government, whose concern it chiefly is, to start and try and do something about the terrible situation in the north of Ireland.
‘I have great admiration for the Pope, I am not an ardent Catholic but at the same time I am thrilled he is making that journey and I wish he will go to Ulster.’
In 2018, she was appointed a Dame of the British Empire for her services to literature
O’Brien pictured at an authors party with (left to right) Iris Murdoch, John Le Carre and Richard Chopping
In a 2019 interview, O’Brien (seen in 2016) said: ‘I want to go out as someone who kept to the truth. I can’t bear phoneys. I want integrity’
In her late 80’s, she travelled to Nigeria for several weeks to research her 2019 novel, Girl, that was based on the horrors experienced by schoolgirls kidnapped by Boko Haram.
It was an arduous trip with dangers and uncertainties, for which she prepared for by smuggling £15,000 into the country in her sleeves and her underwear.
The one book, however, that O’Brien swore she would never write was her memoirs. She felt it was too naked, or naked making. Her agent managed to convince her otherwise and Country Girl was published in 2012.
It took her three years to write and she said it brought her a lot of pain and anger, having to relive certain times in her life.
In 2018, she was appointed a Dame of the British Empire for her services to literature – which, as a republican sympathiser, she received some criticism back home for. One Irish Times writer claimed that O’Brien had been ‘seduced by this empty honour’.
Her response? Crafted by her agency said: ‘The honour is for her services to literature and her belief is that literature transcends politics and borders.’
Edna O’Brien was praised as one of the world’s greatest living writers but her ultimate purpose as a writer was simple.
It was what caused her so much scandal in the beginning and ostracised her in her own country. In a 2019 interview, she said: ‘I want to go out as someone who kept to the truth. I can’t bear phoneys. I want integrity.’
