The Country Girls
— 1960 —
New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017; published in The Country Girls: Three Novels and an Epilogue with an introduction by Eimear McBride; 175 pages
FIRST LINES
I wakened quickly and sat up in bed abruptly. It is only when I am anxious that I waken easily and for a minute I did not know why my heart was beating faster than usual. Then I remembered. The old reason. He had not come home.
PLOT SUMMARY
Let’s start with this. If the author’s parish priest burns a book and politicians condemn it, pay attention: it is probably worth reading. So it was when The Country Girls appeared in 1960, shocking an Ireland unready for Edna O’Brien’s candid appraisal of sex, church, and the proper place of young women.
The story opens with a fourteen-year-old Caithleen—also Cait or Kate—Brady who resides on a hardscrabble property in a small village in the west of Ireland with her loving mother and Hickey, a farmhand. Her much-absent father, Dada, is reckless with money and a hard drinker. It is her father who has not come home.
Cait’s best friend and sometimes antagonist is Bridget “Baba” Brennan, the daughter of the local vet. Baba can be haughty and prone to mischief and bullying. But the pair is inseparable. Both of these “Country Girls” know the world of their remote village in the years after World War II is too small.
After tragedy strikes, Cait and Baba go off to a convent school ruled by the nuns. Chafing against the convent’s rigid routine, they plan an escape and end up in Dublin, where the final section of the novel plays out. As working girls living in a boardinghouse, they share talcum powder and perfume. They wear black underwear that they don’t have to launder as often.
But Baba is still restless. “We’re eighteen and we’re bored to death,” she tells Cait. “… We want to live. Drink gin. Squeeze into the front of big cars and drive up outside big hotels. We want to go places. Not sit in this damp dump.”
Both “Country Girls” seek romance, or something like it, in this brilliant novel of longing, desire, and becoming women, first in a trilogy that continues with The Lonely Girl and Girls in Their Married Bliss.
(Note: The Country Girls is not to be confused with Edna O’Brien’s 2012 autobiography, Country Girl: A Memoir.)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: EDNA O’BRIEN
Born on December 15, 1930, Josephine Edna O’Brien grew up in Tuamgraney, a village in Ireland’s county Clare. Her father, like Cait’s, was a profligate drinker. Also, like Cait and Baba, O’Brien was educated in a convent boarding school. Finally, like the “Country Girls,” O’Brien left for Dublin as a teenager—in her case to work in an apothecary. There, at eighteen, she met a married writer named Ernest Gébler. He later divorced and they married in 1954, moving to London, where the couple had two sons, and Edna later worked reading manuscripts for a London publisher.
While in London, she first read the work of James Joyce. Realizing that Joyce had turned autobiography into fiction (see A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man), she set out to do the same. Offered a small advance by a publisher, O’Brien is said to have written The Country Girls in three weeks.
Published to great critical reception in London and New York, the novel hit Ireland like a thunderbolt. Banned by the official Irish censor, it was also burned by the parish priest in Tuamgraney. Two sequels in the Country Girls trilogy were published in rapid succession in 1962 and 1964; similarly shocking in their day, they were met again with bans in Ireland. (A total of seven of O’Brien’s books were banned in her home country.) She then wrote the screenplay for Girl with Green Eyes, a 1964 film based on The Lonely Girl, her second book. By then, O’Brien’s marriage was dissolving. She left her husband and two sons and, after a lengthy court battle, was divorced and won custody of her sons.
Over the next decades, O’Brien was prolific, writing novels, screenplays, short stories, and stage plays, including Virginia, a successful 1980 drama about Virginia Woolf staged in London and New York. She also was something of a celebrity—becoming part of what might be called the glitterati, winning friends and admirers among movie stars and celebrated novelists and entering a relationship with a significant British politician who remains unnamed. She was an original panelist in 1979 on a long-running BBC show called Question Time, on which prominent people discussed contemporary issues.
In a memoir, Robert Gottlieb, her longtime American editor at Simon & Schuster and Knopf, described her: “She was a glory, with her pale white skin, her flaming red hair and her exotic outfits: ankle-length gossamer skirts, vivid antique lace blouses and layers of baubles, bangles and beads. She dangled and wafted.”
And she wrote. And she wrote. Next came Mother Ireland, a memoir; a book on Byron, Byron in Love; and a biography of James Joyce. O’Brien’s focus shifted in the 1990s to fiction based on contemporary events, including House of Splendid Isolation (1994) about an Irish Republican Army terrorist; Down by the River (1997), inspired by the case of a young Irish rape victim who sought an abortion; and The Little Red Chairs (2015), based on war crimes in the Balkan wars. More recently, Girl (2019), a novel based on the kidnapping of young women in Nigeria, was published as she neared her ninetieth birthday.
In 2018, the international writers’ organization PEN bestowed on Edna O’Brien its PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature. This lifetime award cited O’Brien: “For her powerful voice and the absolute perfection of her prose, and her body of work.”
In 2020 she turned ninety, and at this writing she still resided in London.
WHY YOU SHOULD READ IT
In an extraordinary career spanning six decades, O’Brien wrote many great books. But The Country Girls remains a touchstone for many readers. In turns touching, comic, poignant, but mostly honest, O’Brien’s first novel explored first love, desire, shame, and the overwhelming weight of family and church. Like one of her literary models, James Joyce, O’Brien left Ireland. But the country’s character pulses through her work as it does through his.
In an introduction to the trilogy, Irish novelist Eimear McBride wrote that O’Brien and her book “have become era-defining symbols of the struggle for Irish women’s voices to be heard above the clamour of an ultraconservative, ultrareligious, and institutionally misogynistic society.”
But O’Brien’s concerns go beyond Ireland, Catholicism, and gender. Edna O’Brien is, according to her friend the late Philip Roth, “among the handful of most accomplished living writers in the English language.”
O’Brien’s voice is simply magical. Her concerns as a novelist transcend category and geography. And in these “Country Girls” she created extraordinary characters of depth, empathy, and honesty whose memory lingers long after the reading.
WHAT TO READ NEXT
This one is fairly obvious: move right on to the sequels. The Lonely Girl (1962) picks up the story of the women two years later, as Baba and Cait still room together but begin to go their separate ways. The novel is also known as Girl with Green Eyes, which was the title of a 1964 film based on the book, for which O’Brien wrote the screenplay.
The trilogy continued with Girls in Their Married Bliss (1964), which moves forward several years and shifts the scene to London. O’Brien revised the ending of that novel and then added an epilogue for an omnibus edition published in 1986.