Chronology

1930	Edna O’Brien born 15 December in Tuamgraney, County Clare, Ireland, to Michael O’Brien and Lena, née Cleary. She is the youngest of four; sisters Patsy and Eileen, and brother John.
1936	O’Brien attends the National School in Scariff.
1938	Daphne du Maurier’s popular novel Rebecca published. O’Brien recalls her impressions of the novel as pages were secretly circulated among the women in her village.
1941–1946	Edna O’Brien attends boarding school at the Convent of Mercy in Lough Rea, Galway.
1945	End of World War II.
1946–1950	O’Brien moves to Dublin where she works in a pharmacy and studies at a pharmaceutical college. James Joyce becomes her lifelong muse and mentor following her purchase of T. S. Eliot’s, Introducing James Joyce, a small book containing excerpts of Joyce’s major works.
1948	O’Brien begins writing small pieces for the Irish Press.
1950	Edna O’Brien is granted her license to practice as a pharmacist. Ernest Gébler, O’Brien’s future husband, publishes his most famous novel, The Voyage of the “Mayflower.’
1952	Edna O’Brien elopes with Czech/Irish writer Ernest Gébler. The marriage will be dissolved in 1964, but during the marriage, O’Brien’s literary success is often attributed to her husband, some going so far as to say that he wrote the majority of the works for her. Sasha Gébler, son of Edna O’Brien and Ernest Gébler, born. Sasha Gébler will become an architect.
1954	Carlo Gébler, son of Edna O’Brien and Ernest Gébler, born. Carlo Gébler will become a writer, producer, and director.
1958	O’Brien moves to London where she continues to live.
1958–1959	In the fervor of three weeks around Christmas and the New Year, Edna O’Brien writes The Country Girls, for which she is given a £50 advance.
1960	The Country Girls published. It is the first of six novels by O’Brien to be banned in Ireland. Copies of the book are burned by a curate on the grounds of the local church in her home parish. Edna O’Brien’s mother relates to her that women even fainted over what she had written. O’Brien is declared by the Minister for Culture and the Archbishop of Dublin as a “smear on Irish womanhood.”
1961	31 December, initiation of the Irish National Television Service (Raidió Teilifís Éireann (RTÉ) opens Ireland to the outside world and marks the beginning of a gradual liberalizing process in Irish society.
1962	The Lonely Girl (novel), published and subsequently banned in Ireland; reprinted in 1964 as Girl with Green Eyes. Edna O’Brien’s short story “Come into the Drawing Room, Doris” printed in the New Yorker. She will continue to publish in the New Yorker, her contributions eventually numbering over forty. In addition to the New Yorker, through her career she will also write for Harper’s Bazaar, Redbook, Vogue, Vanity Fair, the New York Times, the Irish Times, and other periodicals. The Country Girls wins the Kingsley Amis Award for Fiction. A Cheap Bunch of Nice Flowers, O’Brien’s first play, staged in London in 1962. Published in Plays of the Year.
1963	The Wedding Dress (television play for ITV Television Playhouse) airs and is published in Mademoiselle (November). United States President John F. Kennedy pays a formal state visit to Ireland and his ancestral home in June. JFK assassinated 22 November in Dallas, Texas.
1964	Girl with Green Eyes (screenplay) adapted by O’Brien from the novel The Lonely Girl. Girls in Their Married Bliss (novel) published and subsequently banned in Ireland. Edna O’Brien and Ernest Gebler divorce.
1965	August Is a Wicked Month (novel) published and subsequently banned in Ireland. Three O’Brien television plays produced: The Keys of the Café for Armchair Theatre, Give My Love to the Pilchards for Love Story, and A Cheap Bunch of Nice Flowers for Festival.
1966	Casualties of Peace (novel) published and subsequently banned in Ireland. Time Lost and Time Remembered (screenplay) adapted from short story I Was Happy Here (1965).
1967	Which of These Two Ladies Is He Married To? (television play) airs. Edna O’Brien attends a teach-in at University College Cork. Her reputation as a rebel and a voice for women’s sexuality makes her attractive to oppositional student movements. Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association founded and modeled on the civil rights movement in the U.S. Attacks on NICRA demonstrations become an important marker in thirty years of violence and unrest in Northern Ireland known as “The Troubles.”
1968	I Was Happy Here (screenplay) produced. Nothing’s Ever Over (television play for Half Hour Story) airs. The Love Object (short stories) published.
1969	Three into Two Won’t Go (screenplay adapted by O’Brien from the novel by Andrea Newmann) produced; produced as a play in London in 1984. “The Troubles” take hold of Northern Ireland, spreading to the Republic of Ireland and parts of England with deployment of British Troops to Northern Ireland 14 August.
1970	A Pagan Place, Edna O’Brien’s sixth novel, published and subsequently banned in Ireland. It is the last of her novels to be banned in Ireland, but not the last to cause controversy there.
1971	A Pagan Place wins the Yorkshire Post Novel Award. Zee & Co. (play) published.
1972	X, Y, and Zee (screenplay) adapted from Zee & Co. [filmed with Elizabeth Taylor]. Night (novel) published. Echoing Joyce’s “Penelope,” the novel is a dream soliloquy. Bloody Sunday (30 January). Thirteen civil rights marchers are shot in Derry, Northern Ireland.
1973	A Pagan Place (play) published. Produced in London in 1972, New Haven Connecticut in 1974. The Fifth Amendment of the Constitution Act, 1972, is signed into law in Ireland (5 January), removing the special position of the Catholic Church.
1974	A Scandalous Woman (short stories) published. The Gathering (play) produced in Dublin, Ireland.
1975	End of Vietnam War.
1976	Mother Ireland (a travelogue with photography by Fergus Bourke) published.
1977	Johnny, I Hardly Knew You (novel); published (American ed. published as I Hardly Knew You in 1978). The Gathering produced at the Manhattan Theatre Club, New York. Arabian Days (nonfiction) published. Edna O’Brien’s mother, Lena, dies. O’Brien discovers a copy of one of her books in which her mother had “blacked out all the offending words.”
1978	Mrs. Reinhardt and Other Stories (republished in 1979 as A Rose in the Heart: Love Stories) and The Collected Edna O’Brien (both short stories) published.
1980	Virginia (play) based on the life and works of Virginia Woolf. First performed at the Stratford Shakespearean Festival of Canada, later performed in England in 1981 at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket, and first performed in New York in 1985. The Dazzle (children’s story) published. Edna O’Brien turns fifty and celebrates twenty years of writing. By this point, she has written eight novels, two nonfiction books, three collections of short stories, a children’s story, five theatrical plays, numerous television and screenplays, and multiple pieces for news and leisure periodicals.
1981	James and Nora: A Portrait of a Marriage, (nonfiction) the first of several explorations of Joyce’s life and work.
1984	A Fanatic Heart (short stories with a foreword by Philip Roth) published in the U.S. by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, a benchmark recognition of Edna O’Brien as a major literary figure. Three into Two Won’t Go produced as a play in London.
1985	The Country Girls (screenplay) produced. Flesh and Blood (play) produced.
1986	“Samuel Beckett at Eighty” (essay). Tales for Telling (folktales retold in dialect by O’Brien) published.
1987	The Country Girls Trilogy, new edition of The Country Girls, The Lonely Girl, and Girls in Their Married Bliss, published with the addition of an epilogue. The epilogue is controversial; O’Brien later states in an interview that she “was never quite satisfied with it.” Madam Bovary (play adaptation of Gustave Flaubert’s novel) produced at the Palace at Watford.
1988	The High Road (novel) published with dedication “To my grandson Jack Raymond Gebler.”
1989	Blood Memory (play) produced. On the Bone (poems) published. Samuel Beckett, whom Edna O’Brien knew personally and cites frequently as a great inspiration for her, dies at eighty-three in Paris.
1990	Lantern Slides (short stories) published. Lantern Slides wins the Los Angeles Times Book Award. Mary Robinson becomes the first female president of Ireland. Early 1990s: Edna O’Brien interviews Dominic McGlinchey and others at Long Kesh prison.
1991	Girl with Green Eyes wins the Premio Grinzane Cavour (Italy).
1992	Time and Tide (novel) published.
1993	Time and Tide wins the Writer’s Guild Award for Best Fiction.
1994	House of Splendid Isolation (novel) published. Edna O’Brien interviews Gerry Adams for the New York Times (published 1 February).
1995	House of Splendid Isolation wins the European Prize for Literature from the European Association for the Arts.
1995–2007	Ireland sees a boom in the economy known as the Celtic Tiger.
1996	Publication of Down by the River (novel), based on the Miss X case, becomes the center of public controversy. Edna O’Brien becomes a member of Aosdána, an organization honoring artists who have made extraordinary contributions to Irish culture. O’Brien is a guest writer at the Kerry International Summer School. O’Brien, along with poet Brendan Kennelly, creates a theatrical piece for a Memorial Day honoring Gus Martin (Augustine Martin), supporter and friend of O’Brien and longtime Professor of Irish Studies at University College Dublin.
1997-1998	Edna O’Brien is a writer in residence teaching at New York University.
1998	The Belfast “Good Friday” Agreement is signed, signaling “the end” of The Troubles. O’Brien and poet Seamus Heaney do public readings in support of the public referendum for the Agreement. Ernest Gebler, Edna O’Brien’s ex-husband, dies.
1999	James Joyce published. A biography in the Writer’s Lives Series, it is a project of great importance to O’Brien and the culmination of her continual reading and study of Joyce, her muse and mentor. Wild Decembers (novel) published; movie version filmed in County Wicklow 2009. Our Father (play) produced at the Almeida Theatre. Edna O’Brien is awarded an honorary doctorate by Queen’s University Belfast.
2000	Love’s Lesson(short stories) published. O’Brien receives the Literary Award of the American Ireland Fund.
2001	O’Brien receives the Irish PEN Lifetime Achievement Award with encomium by poet, Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney.
2002	In the Forest (novel), published. Based on a triple murder, it creates controversy, in part because of the perspective. Iphigenia, a re-envisioning of the classic play by Euripides, is staged in Sheffield, England.
2003	Iphigenia [of] Euripides (play) published. Triptych (play) premiers at San Francisco Magic Theatre. Edna O’Brien is playwright in residence at San Francisco Magic Theatre.
2004	O’Brien receives an honorary doctorate from the University of Limerick.
2006	The Light of Evening (novel) published. University College Dublin awards Edna O’Brien the Ulysses Medal, announces the Edna O’Brien Prize, and appoints O’Brien adjunct professor.
2009	Byron in Love (nonfiction) published. O’Brien receives the Bob Hughes Lifetime Achievement Award in Irish Literature.
2010	Haunted (play) published. In the Forest is shortlisted for the Irish Book of the Decade (Bord Gáis Energy Book Awards). Celebrations mark the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of The Country Girls and Edna O’Brien’s eightieth birthday.
2011	Saints and Sinners (short stories) published. Saints and Sinners wins the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. Haunted is produced in New York. Dermot Bolger launches the Edna O’Brien Lecture Series at the Scariff Public Library, County Clare.
2012	Country Girl: A Memoir published 24 September in the U.K., 30 April 2013 in the U.S.A.