Virtually every account of the reception of Edna O'Brien's 1960 novel, The Country Girls—which was outspoken for its era about the sexual lives of young women—includes the information that a priest in the County Clare village where she grew up burned the book. At the time, Edna lived in London; she learned of the burning in a letter from her mother. Helena O'Brien was what a novelist would call an unreliable narrator. (Edna, who had unwittingly dedicated her book to her mother, was horrified to discover years later that Helena had hid her own copy of the book in an outhouse after blacking out the dedication and every offensive passage.)
In recent years, some doubt has been cast on the book burning. An article in The Irish Times reported that the book was not burned in Scariff. Edna wrote to say that the burning took place in neighboring Tuamgraney, but another letter writer refuted that assertion. Compare the hearsay account of this burning to a documented event that took place forty years earlier: the seizure and burning by the U.S. Post Office of three issues of The Little Review that contained episodes of James Joyce's novel Ulysses, on the grounds of obscenity.
Of course, it is not out of the question that a priest in Ireland burned a copy of the book. Book burnings had taken place in the past. But of much greater importance and influence was the Irish government's ban on sales of the novel, on the grounds of its sexual content. Book banning had been instituted in 1929 with the Censorship of Publication Acts, and it continued for an extraordinary sixty-nine years. Banned along with Edna's first novel and its successors were novels by major, established authors, including John McGahern, Brendan Behan, Aldous Huxley, and even Balzac. (Joyce was not among them, but only because no efforts were made to import and sell Ulysses.)
A precedent, established centuries earlier, was the Catholic Index of Forbidden Books—volumes condemned on the grounds of heresy or sexual content, or because their authors were Protestants—which included works by writers in many fields of knowledge; the Index remained in force until 1966.
Returning to The Country Girls: while many citizens of this overwhelmingly Catholic country would have thought twice about buying a book burned by a priest, the ban meant that even people whose curiosity overcame their religious scruples were unable to read it. Yet the burning is what is constantly referenced, not the banning.
This does make a kind of sense. The denigration of a work of art in a specific public way—a priest consigning The Country Girls to the flames; the rioting of the opening-night audience for J. M. Synge's Playboy of the Western World—creates an indelible image. Whereas a book normally sits quietly on a shelf or in a reader's hands and a play is normally greeted with applause, such unusual events allow us to picture a bonfire with flames licking the pages and theatergoers rising from their seats to protest the play's perceived insults to Ireland, womanhood, and the filial duties of a son.
On the other hand, the decision by a committee of men to ban the sale of a book takes place behind the scenes. There is no unique, startling event, no image to latch onto. There is at least one reported public event connected to the banning of Edna's books, however: in 1970, authorities on the border between the Republic and Northern Ireland seized one of Edna's novels, in a traveler's luggage. Also confiscated was a package of condoms; birth control was not legalized until nine years later.
© Cathy Curtis 2025