Sinéad O’Shea’s Blue Road: The Edna O’Brien Story recounts, in O’Shea’s words, “one of the great lives of the 20th century”. Bursting onto the literary scene in 1960 with her debut novel The Country Girls, Edna O’Brien became one of Ireland’s foremost writers and yet, she was not always welcome here. A figure first of revile and later of ridicule, her books were decried as indecent and morally corrupt and later dismissed as an early version of chick lit. But her writing was unflinching and did not spare the country she grew up in, nor shy away from the meanness and thinness of its life and authorities. Pulling on excerpts of O’Brien’s own diaries, television archive footage, photos from the glamorous Chelsea days, input from fellow writers, critics, and sons, as well as an extended interview with O’Brien herself, the film is a vivid retelling of a remarkable life.
“The country was one that had a stranglehold on the lives of women”
Born in rural county Clare in 1930, O’Brien grew up in a stifled Ireland. She was only 7 when Church and State were married with the passing of the 1937 Bunreacht na hÉireann. The country was one that had a stranglehold on the lives of women. Purity was championed as the paramount virtue, and marriage the only way to a decent livelihood. O’Brien’s family had once had wealth, but, due to her father’s drinking, much of the land had been “sold off in bits, given away in fits of generosity, or bartered to pay debts”. After her schooling, she went to Dublin and worked to obtain a license as a pharmacist, reading Joyce and T.S. Elliot in her spare time. It was in Dublin she met writer Ernest Gébler. Swept up in a wave of mutual infatuation, the couple conducted a short affair before marrying in 1954 against her parents’ wishes. They moved to London, and O’Brien began writing full-time.
“Open arms on the international stage, but greeted by outcry and disgust at home”
In 1960, The Country Girls was published. It was received with open arms on the international stage, but greeted by outcry and disgust at home. The book was banned by the Dublin Censorship Board, and O’Brien was demonised by political and religious figures. In Clare, her local parish priest organised a bonfire upon which copies of her book were tossed and burned. Writer Gabriel Byrne observes that Dublin then was “a male preserve”. God forbid a woman express desire, let alone sexual desire.
Her success embittered not only Ireland but her husband too. Gébler emerges as a petty, selfish character, who could not accept that literary genius resided not in him, but in his wife. The marriage disintegrated in the mid-1960s, and O’Brien left the home for a short time. Both sons chose to stay with their mother, and they would not see their father again for eight or nine years. Gébler insisted, both to himself and to journalists, that he was behind her books, and the misogynist vitriol directed at O’Brien was spurred on by these claims. He scribbled invasive and bitter footnotes in her diaries, while he ironically receded to be only a footnote in her own life.
Following the split, the family moved to a large house on Carlyle Square, where O’Brien began pumping out a book a year while raising two small boys. She hosted star-studded parties, and the house soon became a hub of characters from public life; with the likes of Marlon Brando, Princess Margaret, and Paul McCartney all passing through her door. Her romantic life was littered with cursory affairs and a string of men who left her high and dry. The longest affair was with an unnamed British politician. During this relationship she suffered crippling writer’s block, and went broke. The house on Carlyle Square was sold, and she rented for the rest of her life. There was a collective half-groan, half-gasp in the darkened cinema when the figures were mentioned; she sold the house on Carlyle Square for £235,000. Within five years it was worth £5 million. As her son Sasha said, money seemed to fly from her hands.
One of the most beautiful parts of the film is footage from her son, Carlo Gébler’s film adaptation of her novel Night. The clips are eerie and haunting, we see misty figures – Edna and her father – move around a house, and have tea. Edna leaves again. Her own childhood was pockmarked by trauma, with an alcoholic father who was often violent and aggressive. In the film, O’Brien recounts one particular day when her father came in blind drunk with a revolver, raging over money troubles. He believed his wife, Lena, had money that she was not telling him about. The shot rang out and lodged into the door, where white paint shuddered off the wall. Crouched on the floor with her mother, Edna remembered the incredulity at being alive and able to smell the burning.
O’Shea asked if she had had enough help, later in life, to recover from these traumatic instances in childhood. “No,” said O’Brien. “No, no, no. No.”
O’Shea asks her then about some of the things that made her happy, looking back now on her long life.
“A drink,” she chuckled first. Then, trifle – when she was younger. Then, the tenderness that can be reached between mother and child.
At this moment, O’Brien began feeling unwell and the interview was cut short. She was later admitted to hospital, and the interview was not resumed until April 2023. She spoke then of her father, whom she said she was remembering more and more. She spoke of the glitz she had pursued for years, and of the fields of home where she had always felt freest.
“Distance, it seemed, was necessary to write about the suppressive Ireland of the last century”
O’Brien remained in London for the rest of her life, though she often visited home. Distance, it seemed, was necessary to write about the suppressive Ireland of the last century; where she was too often vilified and held in contempt. When she did write about Ireland, she did so with truth and poignancy, and much like O’Shea’s documentary, she never shied away from the darker aspects of life. O’Brien died in July last year and is buried a stone’s throw from where she grew up, in an Ireland finally able and willing to hold her up as a hero and tell her story.
