'Getting the Words Right'

To mark the milestone 100^th book in Reimagining Ireland, Peter Lang commissioned a special volume offering both a retrospective on what has been achieved to date in the series, and an outline of future possibilities. Clearly, Irish Studies is a discipline that has blossomed over the past number of decades. One hundred books in a series is a milestone in anyone’s language and the series is now the largest and most significant one in the area of Irish Studies, with multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary focus that ranges across literature, literary and cultural theory, Francophone issues, socio-cultural and political topics and a range of new interactions and intersections across a range of genres.

While it is important to mark the series, we, his colleagues, feel that it is even more important to mark the career and intellectual history of its founding editor, Eamon Maher. The statistics of Eamon’s career are impressive. As a research supervisor, he has graduated some nine PhD and seven Research MA students. He is the founding editor of two series with Peter Lang: Reimagining Ireland which is recognized as the largest Irish Studies series with 125 books in print, and Studies in Franco-Irish Relations which to date has 22 books in print. He has written four monographs and one translation:

The story of the reception of Irish literature in translation in France is, overall, a remarkably happy one. In recent times, from the early twentieth century onwards, one is struck by the high esteem in which Irish writers are held in France, often more so than in their home country. Colum McCann has always acknowledged French support for him as a young writer just starting out, implying that without it he might have taken a different path and abandoned hopes of a career in literature forever. Even for established writers like Nuala O Faoláin, translations of whose books, especially of Are You Somebody?, became best sellers in France, French acclamation was an enormous boost even at an emotional level: according to her French publisher, Sabine Wespieser, O Faoláin had always dreamt of being published in France. More recently, the runaway success of Sally Rooney is arguably as significant in France as in Ireland, with her books on prominent display in bookshops right across the country.

The names of some Irish writers have overflowed the literary sphere and entered the public space. In Le Monde, a prestigious publication with a strong arts focus, the Irish writer most frequently referenced since its establishment in the 1940s is Oscar Wilde, with well over one thousand mentions. However, most of these allusions turn out to be fleeting ones – to Wilde’s bons mots or to Wilde as icon. It is as if Wilde has become larger than the sum of his parts, certainly more than the sum of his writings. To date, James Joyce has garnered just over one thousand mentions in Le Monde. Here again, most are ‘second-hand’ ones, for instance, to James Joyce pubs; they surface fleetingly in articles on inter alia Leonard Cohen, Peggy Guggenheim, soccer, rugby and Apple. Similarly, the Frank McCourt most referenced is the billionaire Boston-born owner of OM (Olympique de Marseille), not his Limerick namesake who penned the bestselling Angela’s Ashes.

This is where Edna O’Brien comes in. There are no Edna O’Brien pubs, no ships have been named in her honour, she has no namesakes in the world of French sport! She enjoys fewer mentions, for instance, in Le Monde than Wilde and Joyce, both of whom arguably had an advantage over her in their proximity to the French public since, unlike O’Brien, they had actually lived in France. Nonetheless, from the range, depth and strength of the reception of her work in France, O’Brien emerges as the Irish writer with the consistently strongest presence in France since the 1960s: she is France’s ‘go-to’ writer where Irish literature is concerned.¹ This chapter will explore the reception of O’Brien in France down to 2023 with particular emphasis on her latest novel, Girl, published in 2019. It will contend that French reaction to this short novel is significant as it crystallizes well over half a century of consistently positive French commentary on O’Brien. It will argue that from the time that O’Brien was a young writer, her concerns chimed with those of reviewers across the French media who welcomed her as a soulmate long years before her native country ever did.²

When investigating the reception of O’Brien in France, it is difficult to avoid French adulation for her especially over the past decade. On 7 March 2021, at a lavish ceremony organized sous les ors de la République and presided over by French Minister for Culture, Roselyne Bachelot, O’Brien was presented with France’s highest cultural distinction, the rank of Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. Until then, only two Irish people had received this supreme distinction: Seamus Heaney in 1996 and Bono in 2013. The symbolism of the date for the ceremony, on the eve of International Women’s Day, was lost on no one: ‘La décoration a été remise à Edna O’Brien la veille de la Journée internationale des droits des femmes, comme un écho aux valeurs qui ont construit son oeuvre et accompagné tant de femmes.’³ To quote the French Ambassador in Ireland, Monsieur Vincent Guérand: ‘Les liens entre la France et l’Irlande sont très forts en particulier dans le domaine culturel et littéraire. Mme Edna O’Brien à travers sa vie, son oeuvre et ses engagements en est un magnifique exemple.’⁴ In the summer of the previous year, 2020, O’Brien starred at the opening of France’s leading annual theatre festival, Le Festival d’Avignon, organized in partnership with France Culture, when Maryam, Girl’s main character, was re-imagined by the iconic Barbara Hendricks. In 2019, Girl was shortlisted for no fewer than three prestigious prizes, the Prix Médicis, the Prix Fémina Etranger and the Prix du Roman FNAC. In the event, O’Brien became in that year the first non-French person ever to be awarded the Prix Fémina Etranger not for any one publication but for the totality of her oeuvre. In 2017, she received the Irish Francophone Ambassadors’ Literary Award when the French translation of The Little Red Chairs was selected from a short-list of seven works by a jury of twenty-five ambassadors. At the award ceremony on 23 October 2017, organized in Dublin by the Embassy of Switzerland and the Embassy of Morocco, O’Brien ‘went over her career in a passionate speech before a practically mesmerised audience’, as reported by the French Embassy in Ireland. Nor were her translators forgotten: Aude de Saint-Loup and Pierre-Emmanuel Dauzat were awarded internships at the ceremony by Literature Ireland.

O’Brien is no newcomer on the French literary landscape, however. For well over sixty years now, ‘Mlle Edna O’Brien’ (as she was fetchingly called in Le Monde),⁵ has been a constant on the French literary landscape. Her first novel was published by Julliard as early as 1960 when she was barely 30 years old. La Jeune Irlandaise (later Les Filles de la Campagne) was highlighted as ‘un ouvrage anticonformiste, irréverencieux mais attirant […] un style qui ne se réclamait pas de maîtres’ in Le Monde as early as 9 May 1965.⁶ Her later works were snapped up by leading publishers including Gallimard, Presses de la Cité, Fayard, Stock and, since 2010, by Sabine Wespieser. In fact, such is Wespieser’s confidence in O’Brien that she re-published her earlier books originally published by Fayard but which had become unavailable in French, including La Maison du Splendide Isolement (2013), Dans la Forêt (2017) and Tu ne Tueras Pas (2018).

Still now in 2023, O’Brien’s power to captivate leading French reviewers endures. Her 2023 play, Femmes de Joyce, was reviewed on 29 June 2023 in Le Monde by its main editor of foreign fiction, Florence Noiville, as was her 2021 James & Nora, with Noiville going so far as to imply that O’Brien herself was in fact one of the Femmes de Joyce, O’Brien’s great hero. Another reviewer even draws a parallel between Joyce’s work and that of O’Brien: ‘elle-même réputée pour son oeuvre abordant franchement la sexualité’.⁷ O’Brien features in a recent Le Monde review of Nicole Flattery (born 1989, Le Monde, 25 June 2020) though she is a lifetime older than the young writer under discussion: throughout, she remains the touchstone, the reference point, the year zero, the fons et origo.

The publication in the 2019 rentrée littéraire of O’Brien’s nineteenth and latest novel, Girl, was widely heralded as a major event across the French media. It tells the story of a young Nigerian girl, Maryam, one of several hundred girls kidnapped by Boko Haram in 2014 and subjected to unspeakable sexual, physical and mental violence. As preparation for this book, O’Brien made two research visits to Nigeria in 2016 and 2017, visits facilitated by the Irish Embassy in Nigeria and Médecins sans Frontières, and for which – as Andrew O’Hagan, who later interviewed O’Brien, recounts – ‘she also confessed to having smuggled £15,000 into the country, wads of cash concealed in her sleeves and her underwear’.⁸