Video: Edna O'Brien: Country girl 'brought out a lot of pain and anger in me' Edna O'Brien's debut novel, The Country Girls (1960) scandalised her native Ireland with her first novel, The Country Girls. The book, whose subject was women in love, was suppressed and in some places burned, including by O'Brien's local priest with her mother's full agreement. Country Girl is the memoir that Edna O'Brien swore she would never write, but because her stories have tended to mine the seam between fact and fiction, much of what she tells here - her escape from the tyranny of the church into a tyrannical marriage, her journey from a time-locked Ireland to an England on the cusp of the Swinging Sixties - will be familiar to readers of her novels.