What was it about The Country Girls that so sorely provoked the authorities? Banned by the Irish censor upon its publication in 1960, branded a “smear on Irish womanhood” by the Archbishop and burned by a priest, Edna O’Brien’s debut novel thrust her into the extremes of literary persecution. Sixty years since its publication the coming of age story of Cait and Baba is still as dewy fresh and surprising. Though modern readers might be disappointed if they were hoping to be shocked.



Enjoying the book now, it’s not obvious what all the fuss was about. Aside from maybe, allusion to lesbian awakenings in the elm grove, mention of a nun “getting friendly” with a gardener, and the “dirty note” that results in the girls’ expulsion from boarding school. It seems it was more a question of what O’Brien’s book suggested might happen that what actually did. It’s here lies her great skill as a writer and chronicler; and as Andrew O’Hagan has described her, “a master withholder”.



The real scandal is surely an abusive father, a workman looking for a kiss from a 14 year old and of course, Mr Gentleman’s untimely seduction. The Country Girls is so much more about grief, abandonment and the slow-dawning disillusionment of growing up than it is a work of smut. It was not, like Lady Chatterly’s Lover, a book that young ladies in the 1960s covered with another book if they wanted to read it on, say, a train (as this writer’s mother did).



Having eloped and moved to London, Edna O’Brien sat down to write her first novel in some Aisling jotters, writing furiously every day after she dropped her young boys to school. With her advance of fifty pounds, it took her three weeks, and cost her many tears to produce – though “they were good tears” as she later wrote in her memoir Country Girl.



“The words poured out of me and the pen above the paper was not moving fast enough so that I sometimes feared they would be lost forever…It had written itself and I was merely the messenger”.



O’Brien knew that her mother would disapprove – the portrayal of the hero’s mother is not kind – but could never have imagined that she would disown her. Having heard about her book, her mother wrote to her saying she “hoped and prayed that I was not going to bring ignominy and disgrace on my own people”.