My next book (due later this year) is Fearless: A Biography of Edna O'Brien. This great Irish writer shockingly never even made the shortlist for the Booker Prize, Great Britain's major annual literary honor. Despite more than sixty years of publishing novels and short stories that explored, in gorgeous prose, broad and deep realms of women's experience, Edna was constantly overlooked.
She was appointed to the Booker committee that awarded the 1973 prize to J. G. Farrell for The Siege of Krishnapor, a sign that her literary judgment must have been deemed sound. But this acknowledgement did not carry over to her own work, which some leading critics rejected on the grounds of passages of supposedly florid writing or heroines too much in thrall to their lovers. But other factors may have been at work as well.
As an Irishwoman living in London, Edna was always something of an outsider. Although she had many good friends in the British theatre world and among leading American and Irish writers, she was not a member of the inner circle of mid-twentieth-century British literati. A major reason for her exclusion is that she never attended any institution of higher learning, whereas most of her peers were Oxbridge graduates.
Historically, judges of literary awards have tended to look more favorably on writers like themselves: people with the right educational pedigree whose books are about familiar and acceptable subject matters. Writers of color have always known this. (Note that I am not comparing Edna's struggles to theirs, just pointing out one area of overlap.) Yet it is a truism that many past winners of major literary prizes are no longer read while ignored works by some of their contemporaries have become classics.
There was another issue that set Edna apart. As a passionate defender of the Irish Republic who hoped that the six counties of Northern Ireland (part of Great Britain ever since the Government of Ireland Act of 1920) would one day join the twenty-six counties of the Republic, she was looked at askance by English people who found such political demonstrations excessive and misplaced.
For Edna O'Brien, the failure of her country of residence to acknowledge her writing with a significant award was finally ameliorated when, at age eighty-eight, she received the David Cohen Prize for Literature, honoring her life's work. Of course she was delighted. But a major award would have meant so much to her decades earlier, when she struggled to maintain faith in her vision despite a literary climate that too often trivialized and deplored her efforts.
(c) Cathy Curtis 2025