The Country Girls
by Edna O'Brien
Summary
Caithleen Cait Brady and her wilder, more confident friend Baba Brennan leave their convent school in rural Ireland for Dublin, each chasing a version of freedom the other does not quite share: Baba wants nightlife and men she can discard, while Cait wants love, specifically the attention of Mr Gentleman, an older, married local solicitor who has fascinated her since childhood. O'Brien follows the two through boarding house rooms, dance halls and a shop job, tracking how a friendship built on shared rebellion starts to strain once the girls want different things from the life they ran to. The novel closes on betrayal rather than romance: Mr Gentleman, who has spent much of the book allowing Cait's infatuation without ever risking anything of his own, abandons her at the moment she most needs him, leaving her exposed to a version of Irish respectability neither girl ever managed to escape by leaving the convent behind.
O'Brien writes in a clear, unadorned first person that lets Cait's hope curdle believably into disappointment without the prose ever overstating what she feels. It reads quickly, warm and funny in its early convent school chapters before turning quietly devastating by its close, and its frankness about girls' sexual longing, still rare in Irish fiction at the time, is exactly what gives the book its lasting charge. O'Brien later revised the trilogy's ending for a 1986 reissue, a small sign of how unfinished the original conclusion had left her with Cait's story.
The Country Girls was O'Brien's debut, the first of a trilogy she completed with The Lonely Girl in 1962 and Girls in Their Married Bliss in 1964, and O'Brien drew on her own convent education and escape to Dublin for its closely observed detail.
Historical Context & Significance
Hutchinson published The Country Girls in 1960, and Ireland's Censorship of Publications Board banned it almost immediately under the 1929 censorship act, a ban that extended to both sequels as they appeared. Archbishop John Charles McQuaid and the future taoiseach Charles Haughey are both reported to have condemned the book as filth unfit for any decent home, and copies were reportedly burned in O'Brien's own home parish, though the extent of any actual burning has since been disputed. No literary prize considered the book; its documented record that year is the ban, not an award.
The censorship did not stop the book from being read, and O'Brien's reputation only grew once the ban itself became part of the story literary Ireland told about her. The BBC named it among its hundred most inspiring novels in 2019. A 1964 film version of the trilogy's second volume, Girl with Green Eyes, adapted by O'Brien herself, brought Cait's story to the screen before the original ban in Ireland had even been lifted.