Women In Literature (audio)

Born and raised in a small town in rural Ireland, Edna O'Brien came to Dublin as a teenager to become a pharmacist, but a chance encounter with James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man helped her find her own voice as a writer. She completed her first novel, The Country Girls, in only a month when she was 23 years old. The book was banned in her native Ireland (the censor called it a libel on Irish womanhood), and a priest in her parish had the book burned, but thoughtful critics in Ireland and elsewhere reveled in her rich, forceful prose and she is now recognized as one of Ireland's greatest living storytellers. Although she has spent most of her life in London, the people and landscapes of Ireland continue to fill her fiction. The Country Girl trilogy was followed by A Pagan Place, Night, Johnny I Hardly Kew You, The high Road, Time and Tide, and second trilogy: House of Splendid Isolation, Down By the River and Wild Decembers. Her short story collections include A Scandalous Woman, A Fanatic