In 1960, a young Irish woman named Edna O’Brien wrote a sexually frank debut novel, The Country Girls. She became a literary sensation, writing for The New Yorker, delivering provocative interviews, and authoring screenplays. Her success enraged her writer husband and made her a pariah in her
native Ireland, where her books were banned and burned. She would make her home in London, where she conducted numerous love affairs, hosted star-studded parties, and made and lost a fortune.
In July 2024, Edna passed away and this film provides a final testimony from her, aged 93, as she reflects upon her extraordinary life for filmmaker Sinéad O’Shea’s camera.
Granting the director access to her personal journals - read aloud in the film by the Oscar nominated Irish actress Jessie Buckley - and with additional perspectives offered from Gabriel Byrne, Walter Mosley and an array of renowned writers, Edna does not shy from any subject.
The Garden Cinema View:
This illuminating documentary deploys interviews, archive footage, and readings of Edna O’Brien’s memoirs to foreground her importance to literature alongside the appalling misogyny she suffered throughout her career. Whilst a deep analysis of her writing is not central to this study, there is a firm sense of O’Brien as a hardworking, principled, and resilient artist who faced relentless personal attacks and sexism, from the media and even in her private life. The centrepiece of the film is a remarkable interview with O’Brien, conducted shortly before her death in 2024, which shows her as spikey as ever, but with renewed empathy.
