The good …

Edna O’Brien would obviously never write a typical Irish ‘misery memoir’, though she has experienced more misery than is quite fair, even to the point of planning suicide. Country Girl is an emotional roller-coaster of a book, beginning with two disturbing dreams of her old home, setting the elegiac tone.

Family life was a ‘ragbag of anecdote, hearsay, allegory and consternation’ in a large two-storey stone house among fields in Co Clare, every room and every object in which is summoned up on the page. Father had been prosperous, but was so no longer, and he drank. Mother, whose ways and sayings are recalled as if yesterday, was of poorer country stock and fervently devout. Rosaries, rituals, holy pictures and stories of saints and the fires of Hell, not to mention mother’s dominant personality, filled and fuelled the imagination of the susceptible child, who was already scribbling stories. Her convent education gave her Latin and Shakespeare, and her first experience of being in love — with ‘my nun’.