Irish literary critics unite to defend novelist after article portrayed her as ‘deceitful, flighty and self-pitying’
She is one of Ireland’s most celebrated writers, with a six-decade career that has seen her rove, lyrically, from rural Ireland to 1960s London to northeastern Nigeria. Last year, on receiving the David Cohen prize for literature, she was praised for having “moved mountains both politically and lyrically through her writing”.
But Edna O’Brien, whose 1960 literary debut The Country Girls was banned by the Irish censorship board and publicly burned by a parish priest, is still controversial . A less-than-hagiographic piece about her in the New Yorker magazine has prompted a fierce reaction in her native country, with an O’Brien specialist now lashing out in the pages of a leading Irish journal.
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