O’Brien at home in London in 2012DWAYNE SENIOR FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES
Edna, who died in July last year, changed Irish literature. Her 1960 debut, The Country Girls, was banned by the Irish censor and broke the silence around sex and female oppression — she wrote it in just three weeks, in exile in London. She went on to write more than 30 novels, short stories, poems and children’s books, inspiring such authors as Anne Enright, Eimear McBride and Colm Toibin. Her final novel, Girl (2019), was about the abduction of teenage girls by Boko Haram in Nigeria.
When she died she was working on a biography of TS Eliot. It was years in the making — she had already written biographies of Byron and James Joyce, and Eliot was a personal hero. She gave a lecture about him, called The Leap, which was broadcast at The Abbey Theatre in Dublin on 15th December 2020 to mark her 90th birthday and it was while writing it that she decided she wanted to expand her research into a book.
Edna spoke about him as if she had access to his most intimate thoughts, which perhaps she did: she was friends with the custodian of Eliot’s home and had personal entry to his flat in Kensington, which was closed to the public. She was free to browse his shelves or sit in his chairs whenever she chose.
She emphasised to me early on that this work, the writing itself, was “paramount”; she was exhausted, but had no choice but to continue. I was a “wonderful girl” for coming. I could sense her relief since she had been without a typist and agitated for weeks.
Diminished though she was, Edna had inherent glamour; she wouldn’t greet me until her pinkish lipstick had been painted on, and she wore black silk skirts. Her phone buzzed nonstop and I read her the flurry of well-wishes, with everyone from Tom Stoppard to Barbara Broccoli sending love. When I set my Faber diary on the table she asked who it was that I knew at Faber (nobody, it was a Christmas present). Her conversation was a window into a world where you could bump into Samuel Beckett outside the Tube and grab a coffee with him (this had happened to her; she called him “a tender man”).
* Barbara Broccoli on Edna O’Brien: My friend with a taste for chaos
She was also a natural host, stopping mid-sentence to tell me to drink my tea or insist that I have a biscuit. I saw quicksilver flashes of her life in the 1970s, the sprawling dinner parties hosted in her Putney house, meals and gossip with Sean Connery and Princess Margaret. She had read everyone, met everyone, partied with everyone – and had opinions about them. “Bastard,” she once murmured after finishing a line on George Orwell.
Her previous typist had briefed me; when to speak (rarely) and when to stay quiet (often), what font and size to use (Arial, bolded, in 24 point to make it big enough for her to read), and how to organise the text, which was sorted into loose, disparate topics instead of chronologically. He had mentioned that she was particular, and could be easily disturbed when in the flow of writing. My job was to facilitate the flow.
The typing began with some difficulty when I inquired which chapter we were working on. Deadly serious, she replied that if I asked about chapters she would “totally freak out”. I was meant to intuit where within the manuscript today’s work might fit. Organisation, it seemed, was anathema to her process. Questions were equally problematic, diverting precious energy away from The Work. When I asked for clarification she told me simply to stop talking, and that questions drove her mad. She spoke hoarsely, but each word was precisely weighted. I tentatively shaped the sentences, making assumptions about phrases I hadn’t heard properly.
Her long-term illness also complicated matters; writing seemed at times a necessary agony. I arrived between 10am and 11am and we would work until she felt she could not continue, usually sometime between 3pm and 5pm. Moving and sometimes even sitting would elicit groans of pain and her voice was hoarse. Once, on the phone to a friend sending love, she sighed, “I am too tired for compliments.” Another morning she gravely announced that she would remember that day as the day she nearly died. I made a sound somewhere between a hiccup and a humph, fumbling for an appropriate response. “It’s not funny,” she said darkly. I wasn’t laughing.
* ‘It is not easy to have a writer like Edna O’Brien as your mother’
Occasionally, however, we would hit the ground running. Watching Edna in flow was hypnotic. She would tilt her head, eyes out to the window above our desk, and speak, pulling prose straight from her mind. Sentences arrived fully formed, whole paragraphs running without pause. Eliot’s entire life was intact in her brain, and she conjured it up with all the richness of her fiction. Suddenly I was plunged into the minutiae of his relationships, his casual cruelties and desires, rendered with characteristic savage honesty. During one particularly productive session the words came without stopping, in free fall. “You just lifted me,” she said as we both came up for air. “For two full minutes I wasn’t unwell.”
The obituaries the following year often remarked on her bravery, on the courage it took for her to write so honestly about the experiences of young women in 1960s Ireland. During our time together I felt this unwavering spirit, which could occasionally manifest as insensitivity. One morning I arrived without some printouts that Edna swore she had requested. I didn’t remember the conversation. She was furious, saying our time together was useless. She couldn’t be persuaded to work on any of the other sections we had been writing, nor did she want me to try to locate a printer. She told me acidly that she wished my predecessor were there instead.
I knew what it all meant — Edna had to be merciless, she had no margin for error. She had already told me: the work was paramount, the time was finite. This did not stop me from wobbling. I felt pathetic, and sensed that my meekness incensed her further. She would snap at me for her own mistakes, cross at an apparently errant full stop. I kept typing. We managed to write for a few hours before she had to rest. “It’s terrible,” she said gloomily, “but it will have to do for now.” Her resolve could be cruel, but I admired it — it was her means of resisting, and the only way she knew to progress.
* Edna O’Brien’s ‘extraordinarily eloquent’ final interview
And she could be gentle. Much like her writing, there was a fundamental tenderness about Edna. She longed to chat, even though it sapped her energy, and always asked about my plans for the evening. She wanted to know that I was going out or seeing friends, indulging in youth. At the end of our second evening together I told her I was off to an indie rock gig in Camden, and her eyes shone. “Oh, that’s wonderful,” she said in her lilting accent, almost vibrating. “Wonderful.” Another time, while working on a section titled Love, she asked me suddenly if I was in love. Coyly I told her yes, I was in a happy long-term relationship. “That’s the best news I’ve heard all day,” she sighed, deeply gratified by my response.
During our fourth and final session Edna had me read out loud the text we had written. I was hesitant; she had been short with me the previous day, her energy drained, our work stilted. She cut me off almost immediately: “Louder.” I started again, on a line about a lotus flower, “rising quietly, image for ever”. She stopped me again and put her hand over mine, catching my eye. “Be brave,” she said, half-smiling.
Eventually my Christmas break came to a close, along with our time together. Although the book was nearly finished, Edna was downcast in our final session, the magnitude of the task seemingly overwhelming her. Chapters were still split across multiple Word documents, any formal structure still a dream. But I had to leave. I rose for a goodbye, both of us a little unsure of what to say. We had become used to each other’s company and it felt strange to leave her after so many hours together in the private rhythms of writing. I put my bag down, wanting to give her something, tell her something. She asked me for a hug.
* Read more book reviews and interviews — and see what’s top of the Sunday Times Bestsellers List
Six months later on a hot July afternoon my phone buzzed with a news notification saying Edna had died. I felt a quick rush of relief on her behalf. Having seen the misery of her illness I knew how much being alive was costing her. She had already chosen a grave on an island in Co Clare, somewhere with big skies and neon grass. Looking at her picture I felt a nascent awareness of what it had really meant to watch her work, and to have played some small role in helping. She was truly singular.
As for the book, it will be published in summer 2027 as part of a collection of Edna’s non-fiction essays. Ecstasy, Uncertainty & Folly: Selected Non-Fiction will be edited and selected by her son Carlo Gébler, alongside her editor, Lee Brackstone. She had two provisional titles for her Eliot work, The Hermit Thrush or Eliot in Love. It will also make its way into the public domain as part of her archive, which is being donated to the National Library of Ireland (as she once told me, appalled when I tried to throw away a scrap of paper). I think of our time together often, of her luminous command of language and her innate steeliness. I think about her particular blend of unsentimentality and tenderness, and how she did not suffer fools gladly. Mostly I find myself coming back to the golden lotus, and the feeling of her touching my hand gently: “Be brave.”
Kafka wrote this dystopian nightmare of a novel on his deathbed, leaving behind a request to burn any unpublished works. Luckily his friend Max Brod ignored this and printed The Trial anyway.
When she died Austen was writing this final novel about hypochondriacs at a seaside resort. It was reimagined in a popular ITV drama, but who knows how Austen would really have ended the story?
Perhaps the most frustrating of deathbed manuscripts, The Mystery of Edwin Drood ends exactly halfway through its story — thanks to Dickens’s unfortunate demise. No one knows how it ends — although many writers have tried to figure it out.
Nabokov might be the most fastidious of all writers, which is why it’s disappointing that his wish for this final, incomplete novel to be destroyed was ignored. There are flashes of brilliance in its fragments, but this is not Nabokov at his best.
