The Country Girls by Edna O'Brien (1960), published by Faber & Faber
What's it about? The Country Girls is a trilogy consisting of three novels: The Country Girls, The Lonely Girl, and Girls in Their Married Bliss. It tells the story of two young girls from Clare, Cait Brady and Baba Brennan, and follows them from childhood through the vicissitudes of adolescence, marriage, emigration to Dublin and then to London and the terrible reckonings of adult life. Cait, the timid romanticist, who unfailingly falls for the wrong kind of man and suffers accordingly, is contrasted with Baba who is more hard-nosed, cynical, and pragmatic.
Why should you read it? Predating and anticipating the feminist revolution, The Country Girls is both famous and infamous for the moral hysteria it gave rise to upon its publication. Banned by the Irish Censorship Board for its explicit sexual content, Archbishop McQuaid and then Minister for Justice, Charlie Haughey decided that, "the book was filth and should not be allowed inside any decent home." In 2019 BBC News included The Country Girls on its list of 100 Most Influential Novels. It offers an opportunity to reflect upon those times, the progress which has been made and the contemporary challenges which still exist.
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Watch: An interview with Enda O'Brien
What the critics say: "O’Brien’s debut manages to feel at once enticingly small and impressively epic. Animated by a wonderful specificity of place, of character, of language — a veritable Irish stew of the stuff — it also somehow has the timeless patina of fable." Anna Murphy, The Times.
O’Brien on the reaction at the time… "They had to happen. It was part of that time. it was part of history. It was part of my being a woman, and a young woman. And it was what it was."
For readers of… Small Things Like These, Claire Keegan; Amongst Women, John McGahern; The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath.
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