The Country Girls (Trilogy)
Edna O’Brien wrote The Country Girls in three weeks. Published in 1960 in Ireland, it tells the story of Caithleen "Cait" Brady and Bridget "Baba" Brennan. Upon publication, it was banned by the Irish censor and greeted with moral panic in Ireland. It told the story of two schoolgirls from rural Ireland who attend covenant school, then are expelled and end up in Dublin. There were two sequels — The Lonely Girl and Girls In Their Married Bliss — and I read all three of them together. (They were recently re-released by Farrar, Straus and Giroux altogether in November 2017.) As Eimear McBride writes in The Irish Times, “the moral hysteria that greeted the book’s first appearance has since ensured that both it and O’Brien have become era-defining symbols of the struggle for Irish women’s voices to be heard above the clamour of an ultraconservative, ultrareligious and institutionally misogynistic society.”
And the novels are simply remarkable. Once you begin reading, you feel fully wrapped up in their stories — in what it is like in Ireland in the 1950s; in their desires as young women; in pushing back against the strict confines of their religion.
McBride, reflecting on O’Brien’s legacy, continues: “[The trilogy] set a precedent, raised a flag, drew a line in the sand. With their creation O’Brien gave voice to the experiences of a previously muzzled generation of Irish women. Into bodies raised to the expectation of violence, rape, forced pregnancy, innumerable dangerous childbirths, domestic bondage and the ever-present risk of institutionalisation for intentionally, or unintentionally, bringing social shame on male relations, she breathed the radical oxygen of choice, desire and sensual delight.”
Gave a voice to the experience of a previously muzzled generation of Irish women. What a thing to do! The story at once heartfelt, funny, and sad. The trilogy serves as an incisive commentary on the lives of women in Ireland by giving the readers a clear portrayal of two Irish women trying to make their way in a world not built for them.
O’Brien pours much of her own life into The Country Girls; she grew up in western Ireland, was educated at a covenant, and describes herself “full of romantic yearnings.” The novel is, in a sense, her love letter to her native country.
“I wrote my first novel when I left Ireland and came to live in London,” O’Brien told The Paris Review. “I had never been outside Ireland and it was November when I arrived in England. I found everything so different, so alien. Waterloo Station was full of people who were nameless, faceless. There were wreaths on the Cenotaph for Remembrance Sunday, and I felt bewildered and lost—an outsider. So in a sense The Country Girls, which I wrote in those first few weeks after my arrival, was my experience of Ireland and my farewell to it… The novel wrote itself, so to speak, in a few weeks. All the time I was writing it I couldn’t stop crying, although it is a fairly buoyant, funny book. But it was the separation from Ireland which brought me to the point where I had to write, though I had always been in love with literature.”
I mean… what are you waiting for?
Rating: ★★★★★
