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Edna O’Brien Edna OBrien (born 15 December 1930) is an Irish novelist, memoirist, playwright, poet and short story writer. She is considered the doyenne of Irish literature. Philip Roth considers her “the most gifted woman now writing in English”,while former President of Ireland Mary Robinson regards her as one of the great creative writers of her generation. OBriens works often revolve around the inner feelings of women, and their problems in relating to men, and to society as a whole.Her first novel, The Country Girls, is often credited with breaking silence on sexual matters and social issues during a repressive period in Ireland following World War II.The book was banned, burned and denounced from the pulpit, and OBrien left Ireland behind. Edna OBrien was born in 1930 at Tuamgraney, County Clare, Ireland, a place she would later describe as fervid and enclosed. According to OBrien, her mother was a strong, controlling woman who had emigrated temporarily to America, and worked for some time as a maid in Brooklyn, New York, for a well-off Irish-American family before returning to Ireland to raise her family. OBrien was the youngest child of a strict, religious family. In the years 1941-46 she was educated by the Sisters of Mercy - a circumstance that contributed to a suffocating childhood. I rebelled against the coercive and stifling religion into which I was born and bred. It was very frightening and all pervasive. Im glad it has gone. As an adolescent she fell in love with a nun. In 1950, she was awarded a licence as a pharmacist. In Ireland, she read such writers as Tolstoy, Thackeray, and F. Scott Fitzgerald.In 1954, she married, against her parents wishes, the Irish writer Ernest Gébler and the couple moved to London - We lived in SW 20. Sub-urb-ia. They raised two sons, Carlo (a writer) and Sasha, but the marriage was dissolved in 1964. Gébler died in 1998. In London she started work as a reader for Hutchinson where, on the basis of her reports, she was