The Lonely Girl aka Girl with Green Eyes, by Edna O'Brien
a review by Rich Horton
Edna O'Brien was born December 15, 1930 in Ireland, and died just a couple of weeks ago, July 27, 2024, at the age of 93. She was one of Ireland's most important 20th Century novelists, and was particularly important in bringing a frankness about the sexual life of young women into Irish literature -- an achievement that caused her early work to be fiercely criticized and sometimes banned in her home country. She trained to be a pharmacist and worked at that job in Dublin, but moved to London with her husband in 1959, and never again lived in Ireland. She wrote some 16 novels, four children's books, several plays, and countless short stories, as well as criticism, biographies of Joyce and Byron, and a memoir. After hearing of her death, I decided I ought to finally read her, and I took up the only book of hers I have, a 1981 paperback edition, "in Penguins" as the publisher likes to say, of
Girl with Green Eyes. This was Penguin's 1964 retitling of her second novel,
The Lonely Girl (1962), presumably to coincide with the release of the movie based on the novel and also called
Girl with Green Eyes, starring Rita Tushingham, Lynn Redgrave, and Peter Finch. Kingsley Amis, I note, was an early promoter of her work, which isn't in any way surprising, but it amuses me mildly as both Amis and O'Brien had at least four novels with the word "Girl" in the title (arguably for different reasons!)
The Lonely Girl is narrated by Caithleen (Kate) Brady, who grew up in rural Ireland, as apparently related in
The Country Girls (1960), O'Brien's first novel. She and her best friend Barbara (Baba) Brennan have moved to Dublin, and share a room in the house of Joanna, who seems to be a somewhat recent immigrant. The novel appears to be set in the 1950s, approximately the time of writing. Kate works at a small shop, and makes just enough money to get by, though she's been promised a "rise" in the new year. She and Baba have as an active a social life as they can manage, cadging tickets to dances and such when they can, or pulling tricks like posing as reporters for
Women's Night. Baba seems the more adventurous, and knows several young men, and seems likely to be sleeping with a married man. Kate is a reader, and quieter than Baba, and somewhat sensitive about her weight.
The novel is primarily built around Kate's affair with an older man, Eugene Gaillard, a documentary filmmaker in his mid-30s. (Kate turns 21 during the novel.) This is her second serious boyfriend -- apparently she had a boyfriend she called Mr. Gentleman in The Country Girls. They go on several dates, and before long Eugene invites her to his house, out in the country a bit. It's a beautiful location, and the house is -- quaint. Kate is very attracted to Eugene, and he to her, and eventually she agrees to sleep with him, indeed to move in with him, but panics when he attempts to have sex. He is tolerant of this, and tolerant of her relative ignorance, and they get along pretty well, even though Kate learns that Eugene has an American wife, and a daughter, though the wife has left him and taken their daughter with her back to the US.
But gossip gets to the ears of Kate's father (her mother drowned when she was 14.) Her father is a terrible man, constantly drunk, but the whole community collaborates as he essentially kidnaps her and takes her back home. She tries to escape and can't, and is lectured by the local priest, but finally manages to get back to Eugene's house. Leading to a terrible confrontation when a posse from Kate's village comes by the next day and is only chased away by the housekeeper brandishing a gun, after Eugene is beaten up. Kate does begin to have sex and enjoy it, but it's clear to the reader that this relationship can't last, between the uneven ages of the two people, and Eugene's marriage (and apparent remaining feelings for his wife), and Eugene's growing impatience with Kate's youth. So the novel moves to its inevitable conclusion.
The plot isn't really what drives the story, though. The characters are extremely well depicted. The book is very funny at times -- Baba is a hoot -- and the portrayal of Kate's young love and developing sexuality is convincing, as is the portrayal of life in general in Ireland. And the prose is wonderful. It's a beautiful novel, and Edna O'Brien certainly deserves her reputation.
The Irish literary scene - really the Dublin literary scene - was dominated by male authors back in the Fifties. Unlike Edna O’Brien, very few of them are read today. Maybe being somewhat outside the literary establishment helped, but re-reading these books a few years ago, I was also struck by O’Brien’s prose style, and particularly her voice - a kind of dry, biting wit - that’s totally absent from the work of her contemporaries.
ReplyDeleteThere are couple of interesting glimpses into the times. When the two girls visit Baba’s parents, the oil lamp has been repurposed as an electric lamp while they’ve been away. So Rural Electrification was still in progress. You could probably pinpoint the date based on this clue alone. That is, if you knew the location. And if memory serves me correctly, there are ice cream parlours on O’Connell Street. These were all run by Italians. In Ulysses (set some fifty or so years earlier) there are Ice Cream carts operating in the vicinity of O’Connell Street, so the Irish-Italians had clearly done well for themselves in the interim. They transitioned to running chippers in the Sixties, I think. Nowadays nearly every chipper (throughout the country as well as Dublin) is run by Italians and the same names crop up again and again - supposedly they all came from the same two villages somewhere close to Rome.
Mr Gentleman was probably inspired by O’Brien’s older partner - the author Ernst Gebler, a Czech emigre who made a killing after his book - The Plymouth Adventure - was adapted for screen. I remember him claiming partial credit for both Country Girls and The Girl with Green Eyes, something Edna O’Brien denied. And a mob of sorts really did turn up outside the pair’s front door one night!
Thanks! Very interesting details. I had read that Gebler tried to take some credit for her first novels. And I definitely agree about her prose style.
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