The Country Girls was published by Hutchinson in London in 1960 — Edna O’Brien was living in England by then, having left Ireland with her husband Ernest Gébler — and its effect in Ireland was explosive. The novel tells the story of Caithleen (Kate) Brady, a sensitive, bookish girl from a poor Catholic family in County Clare, and her worldly, cynical friend Baba Brennan, as they grow up in rural Ireland and escape to Dublin. The escape involves a convent school, a tyrannical father, a drowned mother, and the first stirrings of sexual desire — all rendered in prose of lyrical beauty and devastating emotional precision.
Ireland banned the book under the Censorship of Publications Act. O’Brien’s parish priest reportedly burned copies on the church grounds. Her own mother bought copies to destroy them. The reasons were not hard to find: The Country Girls depicted Irish rural life not as the pastoral idyll of nationalist mythology but as a world of poverty, alcoholism, sexual repression, and the systematic oppression of women by the Church, the family, and the state. It showed young Irish women not as passive, pious creatures but as people with desires, ambitions, and an overwhelming need to escape.
The novel’s power lies in its voice. O’Brien writes in the first person as Kate — innocent, hungry for life, terrified of men but drawn to them, oscillating between the language of prayer and the language of desire. The prose has the quality of Irish speech: rhythmic, sensual, full of the natural world (flowers, water, weather, the bodies of animals) that serves as a constant counterpoint to the social world of prohibition and punishment.
The literary context matters. In 1960, the dominant Irish novelist was still the shadow of Joyce; the dominant mode was either realist social fiction (O’Faolain, O’Connor) or experimental modernism. O’Brien was something new: a woman writer who placed female experience at the center of the Irish novel and who wrote about the body — female desire, pregnancy, childbirth, the physical reality of being a woman in a world designed by men — with a directness that the Irish literary tradition had suppressed.
The Country Girls launched a trilogy: Girl with Green Eyes (1962) and Girls in Their Married Bliss (1964) follow Kate and Baba through their Dublin years and into unhappy marriages. Together, the three novels constitute the most important fictional account of Irish women’s lives in the twentieth century — a judgment that has only been reinforced by the recognition O’Brien received in her later years.
Collecting The Country Girls
First edition (Hutchinson, London, 1960): Green cloth, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $200–$600
- Without jacket: $30–$80
- First American edition (Knopf, 1960): $50–$150
- Later editions: $5–$15
The Hutchinson first is the true first and commands the highest prices. O’Brien’s Nobel Prize shortlisting and the 2019 publication of Girl have increased demand for early editions.