Edna O’Brien was born in Tuamgraney, a village in County Clare, in the west of Ireland, into a family that had once been rich and was no longer. Her father drank; her mother was devout and strict. She was sent to a convent school, and later trained and worked in a pharmacy in Dublin, reading everything she could find. Her life changed when she read James Joyce, and realized that a book could be made from the life of an ordinary person in an ordinary Irish place.

In 1954, against her family’s wishes, she married the writer Ernest Gébler, and they moved to London. There, in a few weeks, she wrote her first novel. The Country Girls (1960) follows two girls, Caithleen and Baba, from their village and convent school to the freedoms and disappointments of Dublin. It is funny, tender and honest about young women’s longing, including sexual longing, in a way Irish readers had rarely seen.

The Irish censorship board banned it, and so it banned the two novels that followed. In her home parish, the priest denounced it and copies were burned. Her mother was ashamed of her. O’Brien later said she was cast as a scarlet woman in her own country for writing about what women felt.

She went on writing for more than sixty years: novels, stories, plays, biographies of Joyce and Byron, and a memoir, Country Girl (2012). Her stories, published widely in The New Yorker, are some of the finest in the language. In her late eighties she wrote Girl (2019), about a young woman kidnapped by Boko Haram in Nigeria, for which she traveled to Nigeria and interviewed survivors.

Ireland changed, and came to honor her. When she died in July 2024, she was celebrated as one of its great writers, and as a woman who had told the truth before her country was ready to hear it.