Girl with Green Eyes was published by Jonathan Cape in 1962, originally under the title The Lonely Girl (the American edition retained the original title). It is the second volume of the Country Girls trilogy and follows Kate Brady from the convent world of rural Ireland into Dublin, where she takes a job in a grocery shop and begins an affair with Eugene Gaillard — a filmmaker, older, Protestant, married, cosmopolitan, and in every way the opposite of the world she has left behind.
The affair is the novel’s subject, and O’Brien handles it with extraordinary subtlety. Eugene represents everything Kate wants: culture, sophistication, sexual experience, escape from the narrowness of Irish Catholic life. But he is also possessive, patronizing, and intermittently cruel — not in any dramatic way, but in the daily erosion of Kate’s confidence and independence that characterizes controlling relationships. O’Brien was one of the first novelists to depict this kind of emotional abuse — the charming man who gradually isolates his partner, who criticizes her taste while encouraging her dependence — and her portrait remains unsettlingly accurate.
Kate’s naivety is central to the novel’s effect. She enters the relationship with no experience of men beyond her violent, alcoholic father, and she mistakes Eugene’s sophistication for wisdom and his possessiveness for love. The reader sees what Kate cannot: that the affair is a repetition, in a different register, of the oppression she fled. The country girl has escaped the country, but the patterns of domination and submission follow her.
The novel was adapted into a film in 1964 — Girl with Green Eyes, directed by Desmond Davis and starring Rita Tushingham and Peter Finch — which remains one of the better adaptations of an Irish novel. The film captures the Dublin of the early 1960s with documentary precision, and Tushingham’s performance conveys Kate’s mixture of hunger and fear.
Like its predecessor, Girl with Green Eyes was banned in Ireland, though by this point O’Brien was becoming accustomed to the distinction. The trilogy would be republished as a single volume in 1986, with an epilogue that brought the characters’ stories into the present tense and confirmed what the novels had implied: that Kate’s story was, in important respects, O’Brien’s own.
Collecting Girl with Green Eyes
First edition (Jonathan Cape, London, 1962): As The Lonely Girl. Cloth, dust jacket.
American edition (Random House, 1962): Same text under the original title.
Market values:
- Cape first as The Lonely Girl, in jacket: $60–$200
- Random House first: $30–$80
- Later editions: $5–$10