Biography Essay

As a contemporary novelist Edna O'Brien is in the unique position of appealing to two audiences: she has attracted the attention of a highbrow literary establishment and of a popular audience that eagerly awaits each new novel. Her short stories have appeared frequently in the New Yorker, but she has also been published in Ladies' Home Journal, Redbook, and Cosmopolitan. Among literary critics, opinion on O'Brien's fiction is divided. Reviewed by John Updike, V. S. Naipaul, and Anthony Burgess, among others, her work has drawn judgments ranging from charges that she writes "meretricious trash" or "Gothic malarkey" to comments on her "extraordinary effectiveness and power."

This broad range of audience and opinion arises both from O'Brien's subject matter and from her attitude toward her work. In a 1970 interview with Barbara Bannon, O'Brien stated that she was "very much against literature as such but for the written...