by Edna O’Brien

Edna O’Brien was born in 1932 in County Clare, a region between the Shannon and the Atlantic coast of Ireland. She had a rural Catholic upbringing, and moved to Dublin in 1948, where she graduated from Pharmacy College. In 1954 she married and, a couple of years later, moved with her husband to London. Encouraged by a publisher for whom she was working, she began writing the fictional account of growing up in rural Ireland that ultimately became The Country Girls. When the novel first appeared, it was banned in Ireland under the Censorship of Publications Act—a fate shared by many works of Irish and foreign origin during this period. By the time the Censorship Act was reformed and largely dismantled in 1967, a younger generation had become the audience for Edna O’Brien’s early novels, all of which now became...