Sadly, Irish writer Edna O’Brien has passed away.

Her first novel, The Country Girls, made her something of a bête noire among traditionalists in her homeland, a reputation only added to with its successors Girl with Green Eyes and Girls in Their Married Bliss. As well as those – very short – novels I have also read the equally short novel Night and her first collection of short stories The Love Object.

All concise and to the point.

Josephine Edna O’Brien: 15/12/1930 – 27/7/2024. So it goes.

Penguin, 1970, 166 p.

This is a collection (her first) of the author’s short fiction. The stories date from the 1960s.

The object of the affections of the narrator of the title story tells her at the start that he doesn’t intend “a mean and squalid little affair” with her, that instead they would become friends, but a mean and squalid little affair is what it turns out to be.

An Outing describes another affair, this time unconsummated, between a woman only ever referred to as Mrs Farley, who is unhappy with her husband. The other man is someone she had seen casually at bus stops but suddenly notices has been missing. When he turns up again (after being ill) they realise their affection for each other.

The Rug was delivered, with no clue from whom, to the narrator’s childhood home and immediately became her mother’s pride and joy. Her feckless father allowed himself to be thought of as the agent of its arrival through one of his many acquaintances; but of course it wasn’t.

The Mouth of the Cave is a tale of frustrated hope. A woman on a walk to a nearby village sees another rise from the ground and begin to dress. Thereafter she waits for the other to turn up at her house for dinner, only to be disappointed. She avoids that route from then on.

How to Grow a Wisteria has nothing to do with gardening. Rather it is about slowly coming to terms with yourself and the opportunities lost while you are doing so.

In Irish Revel a seventeen-year-old Irish farm girl goes to her first party at the hotel in the nearby town. It’s a disappointing affair all round.

Cords is the tale of an Irish farm-wife visiting her daughter Claire in London, a daughter whose ways she finds far too modern, but who cannot be her true self while her mother is there. The visit paradoxically moves them apart but also closer.

Paradise is set in a Mediterranean resort where a woman finds herself in a doomed attempt to fit in with the set of acquaintances of her relatively new – and older – lover. He has set her the task of learning to swim while there. She eventually succeeds but the vacuousness of it all starts to get to her.

Pedant’s corner:- ecstacies (ecstasies,) saccharine (not sickly sweet; it was the sweetener, sacharrin,) cow lats (cow pats makes more sense,) “her breathe” (breath,) connexion (connection,) instuctor (instructor,) “would not leave go of her”(is this an Irish formulation? ‘Would not let go of her’ sounds far more natural to me,) light-house (lighthouse.)

Penguin, 1982, 158 p.

Being a further installment of the lives of the two Irish friends introduced to us in The Country Girls and explored again in Girl with Green Eyes.

This book finds both of them married but, as its title sarcastically suggests, not entirely – or at all – happily. Unlike the previous two books in the series which were seen entirely from Kate’s point of view, here there are first person sections narrated by Baba, complete with her idiosyncratic spelling and grammar – in which frustrations with what she sees as Kate’s inadequacies are expressed. The other, third person, sections adopt Kate’s viewpoint. She is married to the Eugene Gaillard she took up with in the previous book and has a five year-old son, Cash. Baba married a “thick builder” who knew almost nothing about women when he met her – and still doesn’t. His money is welcome, though. Their marriage is childless at the start of the book.

Neither of the ‘girls’ acts in what you might call a mature manner even if Baba does have the thought, “People liking you or not liking you is an accident and is to do with them and not you.”

The trilogy could be seen as an illustration of the influences of background on behaviour and the harm a lack of a rounded education can do but this one seems to have devolved into a book about not particularly likeable people acting less than creditably – and muddling through with greater or lesser success.

It is though by modern standards incredibly short.

Pedant’s corner:- Gaeltacth (Gaeltacht,) “less that” (less than,) occasional missing commas before or after a piece of direct speech, a cleaners’ (a cleaner’s,) “Kate slung towards ..” (slunk?) “had looked … and drank from” (and drunk from,) plimsols (plimsolls,) connexion (connection.)

Penguin, copyright page has 1964 but this edition is a later reprint, 211 p. First published in 1962 as The Lonely Girl.

This second part of O’Brien’s trilogy sees Caithleen Brady not really having learned the lesson of her infatuation with Mr Gentleman in The Country Girls. On one of her nights out with her friend Baba in Dublin (where she has lodgings and a job) she meets Eugene Gaillard and immediately finds him attractive. He is of course much older than her but she does not find out till a bit later he has a past which includes a wife and a child. Nevertheless she allows herself to be taken to his home in the country for weekends but only after several false starts (one visit being interrupted by her drunk of a father coming mob-handed to the house and assaulting Eugene) does she finally lose her virginity to him. Even her chance encounter with Mr Gentleman, where she is dismissed more or less curtly, does not forewarn her of the dangers of intimacy on such terms.

She finds the exposure of her background embarrassing and later Eugene characterises her (and by implication rural Ireland) as bred in “Stone Age ignorance and religious savagery.” Eugene’s wife turns the screw by threatening to prevent contact with his child and Caithleen fatally gives him an ultimatum.

Her experiences do give her insight though, “it is only with our bodies that we ever really forgive one another; the mind pretends to forgive, but it harbours and re-remembers in moments of blackness,” but the situation cannot hold. “Up to then I thought that being one with him in bed meant being one with him in life, but I knew now that I was mistaken, and that lovers are strangers, in between times.” Yet she still hopes Eugene will come to rescue her.

Pedant’s corner:- haemorridge (x2, haemorrhage,) a missing comma before a piece of direct speech (many times,) salame (salami,) sprung (sprang,) “a tick in his right cheek,) (tic,) “the Miss Walkers” (the Misses Walker,) “The inside of my lips were covered with water blisters” (The inside … was covered with … .)

Penguin, 1981, 186 p. First published 1960.

Narrated by Caithleen (Kate) Brady, this is the story of two childhood companions. I use that word as friends doesn’t seem to be quite right since Bridget (Baba) Brennan, the other girl concerned, isn’t really a true friend and is always likely to lead Kate astray.

The book is set mainly in rural Ireland in the very early 1950s. Kate’s mother is put upon, her father a drunk, and feckless. When her mother is drowned as she was returning to her parents’ home (apparently having decided to leave her husband) Kate’s life changes as she is taken in by Baba’s parents. Kate wins a scholarship to a convent boarding school to which Baba is also going as a paid-for pupil. Boarding schools are of course hell, convent ones even more so.

Kate’s life is only made bearable by the attentions paid to her by the local rich man known to everyone as Mr Gentleman. Gentlemanly in manner he may be but married as he is and much older than her his behaviour to Kate is nothing short of predatory (and nowadays would be called grooming) even if it is a long time before it comes close to becoming sexual conduct beyond kissing. That his wife seems to be in poor health (or at least highly strung) is no sort of excuse. Nevertheless, Kate is enraptured by him.

Details of Irish rural and urban life (after school, from which Baba contrived to get them both expelled, Kate gets a job in a grocer’s in Dublin where she and Baba share a flat let by a landlady of Central European origin) are scattered through the book. Expressive of the repression prevalent in those days, things barely hinted at, is that, even at sixteen, Kate’s naivety in terms of the facts of life is profound.

Reading this I was struck by the similarities it bears to Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet, a later work of course, and the descriptions of landscape are akin to those in Scottish novels.

Also worthy of note is the book’s length, at 186 pages, remarkably short by today’s standards. Yet it says all it needs to.

Pedant’s corner:- “which was hundred yards up the road” (was a hundred yards,) some instances of commas missing before and at the end of direct speech, cist (cyst,) gamp (used here for a nun’s headdress,) “crinothine fire-screens” (first result on Google for crinothine is from Google books results and comes from this book,) satchet (sachet?) “a memorium” (an in memoriam.)