Edna O’Brien’s Papers: A Transcultural Writer?

María Amor Barros-del Río is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Burgos, Spain and former Secretary of the Spanish Association for Irish Studies (2019-2025). Her research focuses on contemporary Irish literature, particularly women’s writing. She is the author of several monographs and the editor of Transcultural Insights into Contemporary Irish Literature and Society: Breaking New Ground (Routledge, 2024). Her work has been recognized by positive reviews in international journals, grants and awards received to date. She was a recipient of a 2025 Rose Library Short-Term Award Fellowship. 

Edna O’Brien (1930–2024), the internationally acclaimed Irish novelist, laid bare the invisible yet unyielding boundaries—legal, social, and religious—that shaped and constrained Irish women’s bodies and lives. Through her fiction, she tore through the veils of convention, exposing hypocrisies and dismantling the cultural stereotypes that had kept so many in the shadows. O’Brien’s vision was bold and unflinching, confronting the pettiness of Irish society and the rigid structures that sought to contain women’s agency and imagination. Her life as a writer in exile sharpened her gaze: she began to see the patterns of discrimination not as isolated to Ireland but as part of a wider tapestry of female struggle, woven through places and histories marked by violence and endurance. In moving beyond the domestic sphere, she reached toward a broader horizon —a transcultural understanding of what it means to be both woman and writer. 

During my research residency at the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, I had the privilege of stepping into O’Brien’s private and literary world. Among boxes of handwritten drafts, letters and annotated pages and envelops, I was lucky enough to find a letter dated 1958 commissioning her opera prima, The Country Girls (1960). This milestone would propel her to fame across the United Kingdom and America, while bringing her disgrace in Ireland. Her home land turned its back on her for decades. The daring that earned her admiration abroad also made her an outcast at home. Yet, time has its own rhythm of reconciliation. Among boxes of handwritten drafts, letters, and annotated pages, I discovered a letter dated 1958 commissioning her debut novel, The Country Girls (1960). This work would propel her to literary fame in Britain and America but bring condemnation in Ireland, which turned its back on her for decades. The daring that earned admiration abroad made her an outcast at home. Yet time carries its own rhythm of reconciliation and unexpectedly, I found a letter informed her of her election to Aosdána, Ireland’s academy of artists, dated 1996. In that modest document lay a quiet vindication—the long-misunderstood daughter finally welcomed home. 

Equally fascinating was her correspondence with many of the twentieth century’s literary luminaries—Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, Erica Jong, Henry Miller, and Ted Hughes—revealing deep intellectual kinship and creative alliance that would yield her with international publication and acclaim. Also, letters to figures like Jacqueline Onassis and Tony Blair revealed an equally sharp awareness of public life and political change. From her London home, O’Brien sustained these dialogues across continents, attuned to the shifting ideas that shaped art, gender, and freedom. 

Her letters, luminous with candor and insight, reveal a mind that refused to turn away from difficulty. As I read through folders thick with drafts—novels, poems, plays, essays, and scripts, many still unpublished—I sensed her relentless drive to make meaning from chaos, to transform lived experience into enduring language.  

O’Brien’s exile was not merely geographical; it was creative, spiritual, and profoundly fertile. She wrote to reclaim herself, to keep alive the flame of identity that no border or ban could extinguish. Of particular note is her unpublished piece “The public and the private self” (undated), where she muses about the thin line that divides person and author in the following way: “The two selves, in search of harmony. The two selves, at odds”.  

I was also surprised to discover among her manuscripts a play titled “Etty,” dedicated to Etty Hillesum, a Dutch Jewish writer renowned for her confessional letters and diaries. The folder contained several letters exchanged with Dutch organizations that had supplied her with important details about Hillesum. These documents highlighted O’Brien’s passion for research and understanding, which consistently led to her precise and informed writing.   

The Edna O’Brien archive at the Rose Library is more than a collection of manuscripts. It is a living testament to endurance—a map of one woman’s creative self-discovery. I leave the archive with gratitude and renewed inspiration. The experience has woven itself into the fabric of my own writing, guiding me toward a clearer vision of the book that waits to emerge—one that, I hope, will honor O’Brien’s legacy and faith in the written word.