August Is a Wicked Month was published by Jonathan Cape in 1965 and immediately banned in Ireland — by this point a ritual that O’Brien’s publishers had come to expect. The novel follows Ellen, a separated Irishwoman living in London, who goes on holiday to the Côte d’Azur in search of the sexual freedom and pleasure that her Catholic upbringing and failed marriage have denied her. What she finds instead is a succession of disappointing encounters with men who want her body but not her company, culminating in a catastrophe that seems to confirm the Church’s darkest warnings about the wages of sin.
The novel is O’Brien’s most deliberately provocative. The sex scenes — numerous, frank, and conspicuously joyless — were calculated to shock, and they did. But the provocation has a serious purpose: O’Brien is examining what happens when a woman raised to believe that sexual desire is sinful tries to exercise sexual freedom. Ellen cannot enjoy sex because she cannot separate physical pleasure from moral guilt; she pursues encounters with men not out of genuine desire but out of a desperate need to prove that she is free. The result is a portrait of liberation that feels more like punishment — a distinctly Irish paradox.
The south of France setting provides an ironic counterpoint. The heat, the sea, the luxury of the Riviera — all the ingredients of hedonistic escapism — serve to heighten Ellen’s isolation and unhappiness. She is surrounded by pleasure and unable to experience it. The landscape that should be liberating becomes oppressive, and the holiday that should restore her becomes an ordeal.
Critics were divided. Some saw the novel as a courageous exploration of female sexuality; others found it melodramatic and punitive. The charge of punitiveness is hard to dismiss entirely — O’Brien’s Catholic imagination, however much she rebelled against it, could not resist punishing her characters for their desires — but the honesty of the novel’s psychological observation gives it a power that outlasts the controversy.
Collecting August Is a Wicked Month
First edition (Jonathan Cape, London, 1965): Cloth, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $30–$80
- American first (Simon & Schuster): $20–$50
- Later editions: $5–$10