‘A beacon of brazenness and defiance’: Edna O’Brien remembered by Anne Enright, Colm Tóibín and more | Books | The Guardian

Anne Enright: ‘She was all in, every time'

O'Brien blew open the possibilities for Irish fiction, not because of the taboos she broke but because she had broken them as a woman. In 1960, her first novel The Country Girls was burned in the market square of her home town of Scarriff, and every Irish woman who has published since is indebted to the hurt she took on there.

O'Brien's persona was a mixture of steely determination and an old-style feminine vulnerability. She seemed frightened of many small things - she never learned to swim or to drive, for example - but was unafraid when it came to speaking the truth. She had a beautiful speaking voice and used it marvellously well. Lyrical, playful and passionate, her conversation had a self-replenishing fluency. There were no half measures for Edna: she was all in, every time.