Autumn, 1979. At a church in Hammersmith, [London,] Ted Hughes reads from his collection Crow, which my friend buys and signs for me: “O cuoro, congedati e vivi.” Then, at some point, a woman in a long black dress, with a mane of red hair, emerges from the shadows. She recites a dirge about a murdered man and his lover drinking the blood from his mouth. This was the first time I saw Edna O’Brien in the flesh. It wasn’t her own work she read from; she was launching an anthology she’d edited, Some Irish Loving.

I’d heard of her; she’d scripted a disastrous Elizabeth Taylor-starrer called Zee and Co, which I’d seen in my teens and mocked. She was constantly in the pages of Vogue and other glossy magazines I flicked through in waiting rooms, more famous — or infamous — for her rather rackety lifestyle than for her novels (none of which I remember reading.) But the trilogy of autobiographical fictions for which she was still best known — The Country Girls — was meant to be very good; I’d seen and enjoyed the film version.

It was in the mid-80s, when I’d just embarked on my own writing journey, that I read some of her novels. I was impressed, above all, by A Pagan Place; Night, too, was good, as were several of her short stories. A work of non-fiction called Mother Ireland was impressive. But her reputation was fading; away from her mother country, she seemed to have lost her originality, particularly as other, younger Irish writers, such as John Banville, came to the fore.

In 1994, however, she extended her shrinking range with the very impressive House of Splendid Isolation, about a woman who gives refuge to, and falls in love with, an Irish terrorist. The scandalous sexual content of her early fiction, which had caused a furore in her native country; this time, some censured her assumed Republican sympathies.

At the Edinburgh Festival, where I’d gone to launch my novel The Cloud Messenger, in 2011, I heard her converse with novelist Andrew O’Hagan, who had a deep and sensitive understanding of her work. She had just published a collection of short stories, Saints and Sinners, after an unsuccessful novel, and was working on a memoir.

Though I hadn’t read her work for years, I had felt somehow that it was worth delaying my trip back to London to listen to her speak about her life and work: she was 80, and I felt that she represented an era of literature that was passing, if not already over.

She was one of the most charismatic performers of her own writerly persona that I’ve ever seen in a literary gathering: eloquent, even garrulous, at times grand and at others self-deprecating about her scandalous image, but always deeply dedicated to her ‘art’, a term she used with absolutely no irony about the work of others as well as her own.

She spoke about the agony and pain of writing which, for writers of a younger generation, is often dismissed by a reference to a painful wrist or repetitive strain injury. And yet, I felt the passion of a previous generation for the power and resonance of words beyond the page and the desire of one writer to join the ranks of her much-admired mentors, Samuel Beckett, Virginia Woolf, and above all, James Joyce.

Most compelling, perhaps, was her evocation of the natural loneliness of the writing life. (I still ask myself: do we write because we have solitary dispositions, or do we deliberately seclude ourselves to honour our demons and transfer personal or collective trauma to the page? It’s a question I can’t answer, but O’Brien was brave enough to sing the song of the overwhelming interiority of the writer.)

My friend Julia O’Faolain, O’Brien’s fellow-Irishwoman and exact contemporary, observed when I gave her Saints and Sinners upon my return from Scotland: ‘Edna and I have both become expatriate writers.’

The difference was that multilingual Julia had moved away from the scenes of her childhood to write about other landscapes; O’Brien never seemed to escape for long from the Ireland of her imagination. And other voices from Ireland, such as Colm Toibin and Anne Enright, were writing about Ireland with a vitality that perhaps made the memories of a vanished past, particularly when remembered from a position of temporal and physical distance, seem quaint and dated.

When her memoir appeared the following year, reviewers seemed to imply that, apart from retreading the ground of her early novels, O’Brien had indulged in name-dropping and nostalgia. O’Brien herself pointed out that she had also spoken of the intense loneliness she suffered, even in crowds.

Last month, when I heard of her death, I checked my shelves for her books. Most of the ones I mentioned I still have. House of Splendid Isolation has vanished, though a later work, Little Red Chairs, about a Serbian war criminal, is lying in a pile of books I haven’t yet got round to reading.

What I had realised only a few years after the Edinburgh interview was that O’Brien, even in her 80s, was going to keep on remaking her literary persona. Her last novel, Girl, which she wrote in her late 80s, is narrated by a Nigerian Christian captured by the jihadis of Boko Haram, who later escapes to tell her story. It was a brave and, some may say, foolhardy departure from her usual fare.

In a televised conversation with Queen Camilla, O’Brien spoke of the dangerous trips she made to Nigeria and the compulsion to write a book that many might interpret as an act of cultural (mis) appropriation. The author was unrepentant. She had followed her desire to tell the truth as she saw it.

As I look back today at her long life, in which the dominant mission was always her urge to create, I feel that the words my friend wrote on my copy of Crow form a fitting epitaph for Edna O’Brien: “Oh heart, free yourself and live.”

The columnist is a London-based short story writer and novelist

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, September 15th, 2024