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Fearless: A Biography of Edna O'Brien
Hardcover
Biographies GeneralLiterary Figures
Publisher: Atmosphere Press
Published: Sep 9 2025
Pages: 490
Weight: 1.54
Height: 1.25 Width: 5.50 Depth: 8.50
Language: English
Edna O'Brien's journey from a rural Irish childhood in the 1930s to an iconic literary figure, best known for her groundbreaking novel The Country Girls, is nothing short of remarkable. Her convent education provided the raw material, but her innate gift enabled her to imbue the facts of a deeply repressive environment with a unique blend of candor, humor, and sensual description.
O'Brien's upbringing under the shadow of a violent father and devout mother, her tumultuous marriage, and her liberated post-divorce life in Swinging London of the 1960s set the stage for an extraordinary narrative. In addition to chronicling O'Brien's personal life, Fearless explores the controversies surrounding her work, from bans of her books by the Catholic Church in Ireland to her courageous later novels dealing with all-too-timely themes of political violence and sexual violation.
Based on primary sources, Fearless is a comprehensive and engaging biography of one of the most significant writers of our time. It will appeal not only to O'Brien's fans but also to readers interested in the intersection of the intimate lives of women and twentieth-century Irish literature and history.
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Throughout, Curtis is very much on Edna's side. There is a sense in these pages that she has taken up the cudgel and is fighting battles for her posthumously. ... O'Brien's desperate need for love is treated with a deserving sympathy. She cuts a lonely figure at times, especially in later life when she struggled with money, having always spent too much of it. ... Fearless deserves credit for reclaiming O'Brien's work for the theatre, which tends to be unjustly neglected in favor of her most famous novels. Cathy Curtis excels too in tying threads from her dazzling short stories back to Edna's tangled personal life. - The Irish Independent
[Curtis] launches full speed into her subject's life and work: 'It sounds like a great problem to have. In 1960 an unknown twenty-nine-year-old author publishes her first novel, The Country Girls, a groundbreaking coming-of-age story about two young women in rural Ireland. Although the book is banned in her home country, it sells wonderfully elsewhere, gets terrific reviews, and inspires two sequels. Her instant fame leads to obsessive media interest in her personal life. Over the years she burnishes her public image with a personality by turns vivacious, wistful, impassioned, or glamorous, and with breathtakingly candid interviews.' Now we are set up for the intriguing second paragraph: 'But Edna O'Brien's life had not been easy.' Welcome to the rebirth of literary biography. -Carl Rollyson, The New York Sun
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