When I finished what I believed to be the final draft of my biography of Edna O'Brien, several unforeseen events obliged me to wait several years before the book could be published. At first, I was irritated at the delay, but the additional time proved to be a godsend.
Whereas academics generally write biographies of people after a lengthy study of their works, my background is in journalism. I was accustomed to producing a story about a person or event I knew little about in a matter of hours or days. So perhaps it is not surprising that my practice as a biographer is simply to jump in and trust that my years of experience as a researcher and writer will serve me in good stead.
I had decided to write about Edna O'Brien because I had enjoyed reading her novels, because a major archive was available, and because there was no previous full-fledged biography. The book I had just completed is about a twentieth-century American woman author, so I felt confident embarking on the life of another twentieth-century woman author who happened to have spent her youth on the west coast of Ireland and her working life in London.
I knew that I would need to read all of Edna's works—not only the novels and short stories, but also the plays, film scripts, and nonfiction—and become familiar with their critical reception. I would need to learn about her childhood, her personal life, and her professional struggles and successes. But I hadn't yet realized that writing about the life of someone from a culture whose history was virtually unknown to me would involve another layer of research . . . as well as a great deal more thought about what it meant for Edna to revolt against the deeply entrenched values of that culture.
During the years that it took to find the right publisher for what I had thought was my completed manuscript, I began to read more about Irish history, including the reasons for and repercussions of the famine of the mid-nineteenth century. I familiarized myself with Ireland's twentieth-century politics—especially important because Edna was fiercely wedded to the eventual union of the six Northern Irish counties (which are still part of the United Kingdom) with the Republic of Ireland.
I had read James Joyce's Dubliners, Portrait of the Artist, and Ulysses decades ago. Now I became more familiar with other examples of modern and contemporary Irish literature. This led me to discover the brilliance of today's young Irish novelists as well as to refresh my memory of books by writers from earlier generations, like John McGahern and Samuel Beckett, who was a friend of Edna's.
I subscribed to The Irish Times to keep track of today's news and watched Irish-themed films from decades past, including one of my longtime favorites, Odd Man Out (1947), with James Mason, which I now understood as more than simply a tragic story of love and heroism. I paid more attention to attitudes and turns of phrases that are typically Irish and learned that the perplexing diacritical mark (which looks like the French accent aigu) used on certain vowels is known as a fada.
Then I encountered a new problem: how much background information to include for American readers. While biographies published by university presses include copious amounts of such material, as an author who prefers to relate a life in chronological order rather than according to preselected themes, I risked derailing my narrative and thereby losing readers' interest. So I erred on the side of caution, leaving out details that arguably should have been included for a fuller understanding of context. (I do use endnotes for additional information, but I realize that non-specialist readers rarely consult them.)
To take a small example, when I wrote about Edna as a teenager in Dublin in the mid-1940s, discovering a book that would become all-important to her writing life—T. S. Eliot's Introduction to James Joyce—I failed to mention that Joyce had recently died (in 1941, nearly thirty years after he had left his native country for good).
Another complication arose after I decided to launch my biography of Edna in Dublin with a talk and reading at the Irish Writers Centre. I chose to do this because I would be speaking to people who were already familiar with Edna's writing, rather than facing a tiny audience of Americans who had never heard of her. The complication is that, as an American author published by an American press, I included "translations" of British and Irish terms, currency conversions, and explanations of Catholic practices and Irish customs that an Irish or British writer likely would omit as unnecessary. I shall have to hope for understanding on the part of Irish readers.
The months of rethinking and rewriting has resulted in a new way of dealing with the "afterlife" of a biography. When I completed each of my other books, I stopped paying much attention to their subjects. But one of the rewards of having immersed myself in all things Irish for several years is that I remain intensely fascinated with this country, and continue to read its writers, stay abreast of its news, and admire the wit and grit of a people with a tragic history that has left its mark even in times of peace and relative plenty.
© Cathy Curtis 2025