Latest news with #EdnaO'Brien
Times
29-04-2025
- Times
Only in death are we sure where we belong
In life, the Irish author Edna O'Brien was unlucky in property. When she found herself of slender means she sold her London townhouse for £375,000; five years later it was worth £5 million. It wasn't only about money, though. There was something restless in her character, an itinerant mind and body, running away from Ireland and washing up in Putney then Chelsea before she died in 2024. Only in death was she sure of where she wanted to settle. Some years previously, O'Brien had bought a plot on Holy Island, a freckle of sacred land on Lough Derg in the west of Ireland. Her mother's people were buried there, she said, in the shadow of ancient churches and graveyards of saints. No one lives on
The Guardian
20-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Blue Road: The Edna O'Brien Story review – richly bittersweet portrait of an Irish literary great
Her raw, sexually and emotionally frank prose made her a sensation and got the Irish Catholic church hot under the cassock. She was an eloquent wit, a provocateur who could hold her own in literary circles and in the glittering party circuit of 1960s London. It's now widely acknowledged that she was one of the greats of Irish literature. But the slightly bitter aftertaste left by this otherwise richly enjoyable documentary portrait of the writer Edna O'Brien comes from the decades of bullying and ridicule she had to endure before her talent was fully recognised. Much of it originated uncomfortably close to home: Blue Road, which features interviews with the 93-year-old O'Brien shortly before her death last year, tells of her tumultuous marriage to fellow writer Ernest Gébler, who was not a man able to graciously accept the fact that his wife's success had eclipsed his own. Jessie Buckley reads excerpts from O'Brien's novels and diaries, capturing the music in her lifelong dance with language. In UK and Irish cinemas
