The Country Girls. London: Hutchinson & Co. Ltd, 1960.

EDNA O’BRIEN (b.1930)
The Country Girls. London: Hutchinson & Co. Ltd, 1960.
First edition of a highly influential and controversial Irish novel, signed and annotated by the author over 60 years after its first publication. Written in just three weeks, O’Brien’s mould-breaking novel about two young country girls exploring life in the big city was greeted with outrage by the Irish authorities. Banned by the Irish censorship board and subject to multiple public book burnings, ‘the moral hysteria that greeted the book’s first appearance has since ensured that both it and O’Brien have become era-defining symbols of the struggle for Irish women’s voices to be heard above the clamour of an ultraconservative, ultrareligious and institutionally misogynistic society’ (Eimear McBride, Irish Times, Sep 16, 2017). The author, now in her nineties, has annotated the present copy with 152 words of commentary and amendments. She explains that this is a novel that could not have been written later in her life, as it would have lacked the ‘the buoyancy or the comedy of youth’. O’Brien also makes edits to 21 pages of her text, but wishes not to go too far with her amendments: ‘a novel is in some ways an ongoing dream and just as we can’t re-edit dreams it is impossible to do so with a novel’.

Octavo. Original black cloth, blue label and gilt lettering to spine, pictorial dust jacket (spine slightly rolled; dust jacket with a few short nicks and tears at extremities, some stains to spine and lower panel and bottom edge of upper panel).

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