Edna O’Brien, groundbreaking Irish novelist, dies at 93

The book poured out of her in three weeks, and Ms. O’Brien seemed to have emerged from nowhere fully formed as a writer, producing lyrical prose whose tone and detail perfectly captured her characters’ inner lives and desires and presaged the sexual revolution.

Literary scholars today view “The Country Girls” as deeply influential. “By turns beautiful and bawdy, funny and haunting, ‘The Country Girls,’ often referred to as the quintessential tale of Irish girlhood, is not the novel that broke the mould: it is the one that made it,” Irish novelist Eimear McBride observed.

The novel, released before Ms. O’Brien turned 30, received critical accolades in Britain and the United States but was banned in Ireland. Her mother, who claimed that a local priest had publicly burned the book, kept a copy but redacted the passages she found devilish, the author recalled, “with good, deep, black ink.”

Ms. O’Brien seemed resigned to, even bemused by, the pariah status her early books conferred on her back home in County Clare.

“I believe that mental disturbance by literature is a healthy and invigorating thing,” Ms. O’Brien told the British newspaper the Guardian in 1965. “We have plenty of comfortable and easy prose all around us, but it’s by abrasion that people’s prejudices are aroused.”

Ms. O’Brien grew up in a newly independent and staunchly Catholic Ireland with firm ideas about the roles of women, who had no lawful access to abortion, contraception or divorce. In much of her work, Ms. O’Brien limned characters who yearned to break free of “the stranglehold I grew up with” but who often fell victim to their desires and dreams.

She took pains to say her work, which included plays, screenplays and short stories, was not strictly autobiographical — she wrote a 2012 memoir titled “Country Girl” — but if she needed inspiration for her tales, her life would have been a gold mine.

She quested for romance, but her relationships did not last. In her late 70s, she told a BBC radio interviewer: “I don’t think I have ever learned the game of men and women. To this day I regret the fact that it’s like a dance I couldn’t learn.”

After a failed love affair in the 1980s, she returned to the one relationship that would abide — with the written word — and she was still turning out handwritten manuscripts in her late 80s.

Like her hero James Joyce, she chose to write about Ireland from self-exile. She spent most of her life in London, and, young and famous, did her bit to define the Swinging Sixties and drag the decade into the Sagging Seventies. She bought a big house in…