FUNERAL DETAILS have been announced for acclaimed Tuamgraney born writer Edna O’Brien.
Edna who spent most of her life in London died peacefully at the age of ninety three on July 27th.
Her funeral will take place in her native East Clare this weekend. She will repose at St Joseph’s Church, Tuamgraney on Friday from 5pm with prayers at 8pm. This is the church where she was baptised.
Large crowds will also return to St Joseph’s Church on Saturday for the funeral mass which is set to start at 11am. Her burial will take place afterwards on Holy Island where her grandparents are also buried.
Books of condolence for Ms O’Brien have been opened online and also at Clare County Council headquarters in Ennis, as well as the public library in Scariff which was formally named the “Edna O’Brien Library” in May of this year.
She rose to fame in the 1960s after her trilogy, The Country Girls was published, to say it caused a stir is putting it mildly. She wrote the book in a fury of inspiration that lasted two and a half weeks. It was the story of two Catholic girls, the shy, sensitive Kate Brady and her rebellious friend Baba Brennan and their sexual awakening in Dublin. She lived most of her life in London but frequently returned to Co Clare for holidays and family. In 2015 she was elected to Aosdána by her fellow artists and honoured with the title Saoi. In 2018, she was appointed an honorary Dame of the Order of the British Empire.
For decades, her work was more highly praised outside Ireland than in her homeland, which she left for good in the 1960s. With her auburn hair, green eyes and Irish country lilt, she was seen by non-Irish critics as the embodiment of Ireland itself. But in Ireland, her persona struck many as too rich to be real. (The Irish literary critic Denis Donoghue called her “stage Irish.”)
Her work eventually won over many critics. In 2001, she received the Irish PEN lifetime achievement award, and in 2018, the PEN/Nabokov award for achievement in international literature.
Philip Roth described Edna prior to her death as the greatest living woman writing in English.
Writing for The Guardian, Ed Vulliamy noted that Edna had ‘hawk eyes’ “that missed nothing and could flick from beautiful to melancholy to unforgiving in a micro-moment and took a few notes”. He added, “Like millions before her, Edna left Ireland, yet didn’t. She was as much a child of Erin when she died last week as the day she was born. She felt Irish, she thought with an Irish diagonal intelligence, she had that inimitably droll Irish sense of humour and she wrote in the Irish tradition. She refused to distance herself from the Troubles: in House of Splendid Isolation (1994), an IRA volunteer called McGreevey laments the republic’s betrayal of its cause. McGreevey is based partly on the Provo (later Irish National Liberation Army) leader Dominic McGlinchey, whom Edna visited in jail. The book was received with outrage, wonderfully defended by Edna when she told the literary critic Dawn Miranda Sherratt-Bado, ‘I am a savage writer with a savage eye. I write about the things we are not supposed to speak about’.”
Dame O’Brien is predeceased by her brother John, sisters Patricia and Eileen and her husband Ernest Gebler. She is survived by her sons Carlo Gebler and Marcus Gebler, daughter-in-law Tyga Gebler, Marcus’s partner Marieme Dieng, her grandchildren India, Jack, Finn, Georgia, Euan and Oscar, great-grandchildren Sam, Noah and Lexi, brothers-in-law and sisters-in-law, nieces, nephews, extended family, her large circle of friends and colleagues.
