When I was an impressionable girl in my early teens, I read a wonderful novel that has haunted me ever since. Cait and Baba were older than me, convent schoolgirls who grew up in Catholic Ireland, and I was English-Australian and an agnostic, but I identified with them all the same. Especially Cait, the dreamy girl with romantic ideals and yearnings.
Baba was a bit more worldly. And both of them were on their way to the big bad city to experience life. Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls caused a huge kerfuffle in Ireland.
Credit: Leonardo Cendamo Their story is told in Edna O’Brien’s 1960 novel, The Country Girls , and in the two novels that followed, The Lonely Girls and Girls in Their Married Bliss . Together they make up what is called the Country Girls Trilogy. I eagerly devoured all three books, and looking back now, I can’t remember precisely what happened in which book.
But what I do remember is my sense of awe at what was for the time pretty explicit erotic detail, and also a profound sadness. Because, of course, there were men who exploited that girlish hope and naivety. Edna O’Brien pictured four years after The Country Girls came out.
Credit: Since O’Brien’s recent death at the age of 93, there has been a well-deserved outpouring of praise for a great novelist who paved the way for today’s Irish writers, particularly women. She inspired writers as diverse as Anne Enright, Claire Keegan and Sally Rooney – and a few males too, notably Colm Toibin. B.