Irish novelist and memorialist Edna O'Brien passed away in July 2024 aged 93. This photograph of O'Brien was taken by Cecil Beaton in 1971.
From Banned to Beloved: A review of The Country Girls by Edna O’Brien
words by Amanda Gibbons | rated 9/10
Once banned and branded obscene, Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls is now celebrated as a groundbreaking, quietly radical novel that gave voice to young Irish women’s inner lives—and which still resonates powerfully today.
The Country Girls ignited controversy in Ireland when it was first published in 1960. Condemned by the Catholic Church and banned by the Irish Censorship Board, O’Brien’s coming-of-age novel about two girls growing up in rural Ireland was labelled as ‘indecent and obscene’. Today, it’s clear that what truly unnerved the establishment was the novel’s challenge to religious and patriarchal control. The novel broke new ground, giving voice to the private lives, desires and frustrations of young Irish women at a time when their perspectives were rarely seen in literature.
Contemporary readers expecting explicit sex scenes won’t find them in the first book of O’Brien’s trilogy. The Country Girls contains no actual sex: the uproar it caused was less about graphic content and more about the novel’s questioning of strict Catholic and social norms at a time when female desire was rarely acknowledged—let alone written about. O’Brien’s candid portrayal of Caithleen and Bridget’s hopes, fears, and rebellion—along with the harsh, often cruel treatment they receive from nuns at their convent school—exposed the suffocating and unforgiving nature of mid-century Ireland for young women. Comments directed at O’Brien by literary critics also exposed the deep-rooted chauvinism and double standards of the literary establishment in the early 1960s. In a piece for the Guardian, O’Brien recalls that, instead of taking the novel seriously, Frank O’Connor wrote that O’Brien had appalling taste in men in the New York Times, while LP Hartley dismissed Cait and Baba as ‘a pair of nymphomaniacs’.
Caithleen ‘Cait’ Brady and Bridget ‘Baba’ Brennan are best friends with a fraught and complicated bond. Cait is the daughter of a mother she loves deeply and a violent alcoholic father who has allowed the family’s farm to go to ruin. While Cait is earnest and romantic, Baba is sharp, mocking, and often cruel. The daughter of the village’s vet, she comes from a respectable family with money and status—and she never misses an opportunity to assert her superiority to Cait. The tension between the two, which swings between loyalty and rivalry, affection and bitterness, shapes their bond. Despite the ongoing friction between them, they cling to each other because of their shared history and mutual need for companionship. ‘Coy, petty, malicious Baba was my friend and the person I feared most after my father,’ says Cait.
After being expelled from their convent school in scandalous circumstances, Cait and Baba head to the bright lights of Dublin to seek their freedom. While Cait works in a greengrocer’s shop, Baba focuses her energy on meeting wealthy men, pushing Cait to join her at dances and on double dates. Cait, however, remains obsessed with an older married French man from their village, who has been showing her attention since she was just fourteen. Known as ‘Mr Gentleman’, because the villagers cannot pronounce ‘de Maurier’, Cait’s relationship with him makes for unsettling reading. Along with Cait’s romanticism, it reveals her vulnerability and the deep yearning for connection that blinds her to the uncomfortable reality of his attention. Today, of course, Mr Gentleman would be condemned for grooming a young girl, but, disturbingly, he is not the only older man in the village who wants kisses from young Caithleen. The normalisation of such behaviour speaks volumes about the society O’Brien portrays, where young women’s innocence is exploited under the guise of courtship, and the boundaries of power and consent are frequently blurred.
Cait’s experience reflects both her fragile and naive hopefulness and the dark realities that lurked beneath the surface at that time. Meanwhile, the way Baba throws herself into the city’s social whirl with relentless determination reveals her hunger for thrills and material wealth. ‘I thought of standing under a streetlight in the rain with my hair falling crazily about, my lips poised for the miracle of a kiss. A kiss. Nothing more,’ Cait tells us. Baba, on the other hand, tells Cait: “We want to live. Drink gin. Squeeze into the front of big cars and drive up outside big hotels. We want to go places.’
Despite their different outlooks, both girls’ are desperate to escape from the suffocating environment in which they have grown up. This tension between the freedom the girls crave and the constraints imposed on young women by the oppressive forces of Catholicism and patriarchy, along with social class, is central to the novel.
Religion shapes the girls' lives, desires, and their sense of themselves from a young age, when Caithleen gets out of bed ‘six or seven times every night as an act of penance’ for sins she fears she may have committed. Life is even harsher for the girls at the convent school, where the nuns have little empathy for the girls in their care. On Caithleen’s first day, the tea set she has brought to remind her of her late mother is taken away. Bringing it, she is told, was ‘sentimental childish conduct’. That night, ‘The whole dormitory was crying. You could hear the sobbing and choking under the covers. Smothered crying.’ The emphasis on emotional repression is matched by the school’s rigid religious instruction. Piety and obedience define the girls’ moral education. When they are taught about the Sixth Commandment (Thou shalt not commit adultery), they are told, ‘This was the most important lecture of all’.
Class divides are a persistent undercurrent throughout the novel. Baba’s cruelty towards Cait is rooted in more than personality clashes: it reflects the sense of superiority she has absorbed from Ireland’s rigid social hierarchy. Through their intertwined stories, O’Brien critiques the country’s stifling class structures, which breed snobbery and hard-heartedness in Baba, while leaving lower-class young women, such as Caithleen, vulnerable to exploitation.
Moments of lyrical beauty appear in the recurring motifs of nature and landscape. Cait’s vivid descriptions of the Irish countryside, which she can still picture in her mind even in Dublin, reveal her deep connection to the natural world, even as she feels relieved to have escaped from her father and the claustrophobia of rural life. There’s also a charming softness to the way she captures Cait’s inner world—but it’s never sentimental. The novel’s narrative voice has a quiet wit that grows as Cait’s innocence gradually gives way to greater understanding and self-awareness.
Reading The Country Girls is a moving experience. There’s a restraint to the novel that makes its emotional impact feel all the more powerful. In fact, I would say it is O’Brien’s spareness that makes her characters’ longing, shame and quiet rebellions feel so real. I recognised something painfully familiar in Cait’s romanticism, her instinct to retreat into fantasy, and her hope that Mr Gentleman might be her rescuer. And I was struck by how clearly O’Brien depicted the cost of growing up in a culture that refuses to take young women seriously—where their desire for love and freedom is treated as dangerous, even shameful.
The Country Girls is a novel that stays with you long after you’ve finished reading it. I loved the beauty of its language and its sharp, dark humour, but, most of all, I loved the way it captures the messy, hopeful, and often painful experience of growing up as a young woman in a harsh, patriarchal society. Sixty-five years after its publication, it can finally be celebrated as a quiet but powerful act of defiance that broke the silence around Irish women’s lives and opened the door for more women’s unheard stories to be shared. Women of all ages will love it—especially those of us who, like Cait and Baba, grew up in the countryside.