This continued for several paragraphs. In a subsequent e-mail, she took pains to say, “I was setting things down so that you may write them in your own way and with your own perceptions. They were guidelines.”

In the spring of 1960, just before the publication of “The Country Girls,” which tells of two young Irishwomen entering adulthood, O’Brien went to a dinner party in Chelsea. She was not quite thirty. Brought up in a village in County Clare, in the west of Ireland, O’Brien had studied at a Catholic boarding school, then trained, in Dublin, to become a pharmacist. There, to her family’s regret, she met an older man, Ernest Gébler—a novelist, separated from his wife, who had had a best-seller with “The Plymouth Adventure,” an account of the Mayflower voyage. They married and, in 1958, moved to London’s southwestern suburbs with two young sons, who, in recognition of Gébler’s political views, had been given the names Karl and Marcus. (Gébler’s son from his first marriage was also named Karl.)

Among the other guests at the London dinner were Rebecca West, the writer, and Peter Eyre, the actor, then still a teen-ager. “I remember you having rather curly hair,” Eyre told O’Brien one afternoon this past summer, when he joined her for lunch at the Wolseley, a big, busy Art Deco restaurant on Piccadilly, where a nice fuss is made over her. Eyre and O’Brien have been friends for sixty years.

O’Brien is known for reddish-brown hair that is abundant but not curly. “Maybe I’d had it done in a bad hairdresser’s that day,” she said. The dinner party, she went on, was probably the first such literary affair of her life. A moment later: “Oh, Lord—many lives, Peter.”

Eyre recalled that, at the dinner, O’Brien had been “intense, nervous, and completely sweet.” He subsequently met Gébler—who projected unease about having become, suddenly, the lesser-known writer in the marriage. “You can tell when someone is sort of frozen with jealousy,” Eyre said. O’Brien has written that when Gébler read “The Country Girls,” in manuscript, he told her, “You can write and I will never forgive you.” (The novel is alive with moments when a woman narrator offers acute observations of other women: “She made piano movements with her fingers, so that the nail polish would dry quickly.”)

O’Brien said of Gébler, “He was a difficult man.” She looked down at her plate, where there was half a lobster. Expressing surprise that the lobster was in the shell, she said, “I didn’t know that it entailed engineering!” She pressed on with a martyr’s fortitude, making only occasional protests. O’Brien often writes about people who have been let down, one way or another, and at a quotidian level she seems most comfortable when registering discomfort, and accepting amends. A former friend recently described her as “regal.” I came to think that, were O’Brien given a choice between a punctual guest and a mortified, unpunctual one, she would opt for the latter. Maureen O’Connor, the academic, who is one of several people who have considered taking on the task of writing an authorized Edna O’Brien biography, once spent a few weeks reading through the archive of O’Brien’s papers at Emory University; it includes correspondence with Samuel Beckett, John Cassavetes, and Laurence Olivier. A few days in, a librarian offered to bring out correspondence that she categorized as “Apologizing to Edna”: letters from stores, carpenters, airlines.

O’Brien has said that “The Country Girls” took three weeks to write. In the novel’s first chapters, Caithleen and her friend Baba are still living at home, in rural Ireland. Caithleen, whose voice is at once alert and naïve, conjures the village: “Billy Tuohey nodded to us through the open window space. It was so smoky in there we could hardly see him. He lived with his mother in a cottage at the back of the forge. They kept bees, and he was the only man around who grew Brussels sprouts. He told lies, but they were nice lies. He told us that he sent his photo to Hollywood and got a cable back to say come quick you have the biggest eyes since Greta Garbo. He told us that he dined with the Aga Khan at the Galway races and that they played snooker after dinner.”

At lunch, Peter Eyre asked O’Brien if she recalled the approving commotion that had surrounded the novel’s publication. In the New Statesman, V. S. Naipaul described the book as “a first novel of great charm by a natural writer.” The Times of London said, “O’Brien shows an ear for dialogue and an eye for description. She is frank and gay.” Polly Devlin, the Northern Irish writer, who moved to London a few years after O’Brien did, recently recalled that “The Country Girls” forced her to acknowledge her own competitiveness: “What was very hard to come to terms with was she had written an enchanting book—a book so full of vivid life—about what I’d been brought up to believe were ‘bad girls.’ ” Laughing, she added, “This terribly successful, very beautiful young Irish woman—I fucking hated her.”

“You know, sooner or later we’re going to have to let her go out unaccompanied.” Facebook

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O’Brien told Eyre, “I felt I had done something that I always wanted to do—write a book and get it published. But I had also made a lot of trouble for myself.” She said that only the faintest “overhearings” of interest in the book reached her at home, in “Morden, SW20.”

Eyre looked blank. “Where the hell is that?”

“Exactly,” O’Brien said. She’d made it to London, but to a neighborhood that other Londoners couldn’t find on a map. After O’Brien left the suburbs—and her husband—in 1962, Eyre was often a guest at her parties. But, she reminded him, “Morden was pre-parties.” Few people visited, although those few included Vanessa Redgrave—whom she met when both were briefly held in police custody, after a Trafalgar Square protest against nuclear weapons—and Naipaul. (A few years later, Naipaul and his wife “came to stay in my house briefly,” O’Brien told me. “But it wasn’t brief. It went on for some weeks. More than I imagined. Weeks and weeks. It was—too long.”)

O’Brien asked Eyre about a recent illness, and they talked about hospitalization.

“When I’m in a car and drive past a hospital, I freeze,” O’Brien said.

Eyre noted the strangeness of any glimpse, from a hospital window, of life going on outside. “People running, or whatever—”

“—always with suitcases.”

“I’d think, I used to be in that world!” Eyre said. “I wasn’t frightened. I just entered this other sphere.”

O’Brien asked how people were able to watch more than one episode of the HBO series “Chernobyl” at a sitting, and she listened, without satisfaction, to talk of streaming and binge-watching. Her ideal TV viewing is European club soccer. When we first spoke on the phone, we discussed Barcelona’s underpowered performance on a recent visit to Liverpool. “Messi looked like someone who just came out of a badger burrow!” she said. “And I love Messi.”

O’Brien asked Eyre, “Does my brain seem gone to you?”

“No, not at all!” he said.

“Oh, good,” she said. “That’s all that’s left.” Kisses were blown. “Shall we dance?”