Coda: Edna O’Brien and Eimear McBride

Summary

This coda examines responses to Edna O’Brien’s fiction of the 1960s and 1970s and recent novels by Eimear McBride, in order to assess the changing climate for Irish women’s fiction and characterisations of the Irish woman writer. Both sets of works anatomise women’s experience at crucial junctures in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, but while O’Brien’s work was banned in the 1960s for its reputedly salacious content, in contrast, Eimear McBride’s sexually explicit 2013 novel A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing (though it took years to find a publisher) was immediately embraced by critics and celebrated as an exemplar of contemporary Irish writing. The chapter discusses responses to the female bildungsroman and representations of female sexuality, sexual abuse, and violence.