Glimpses of the real Edna, but veil remains drawn

The fascination with the writer, Edna O’Brien, continues and thanks to plenty of TV appearances by her over the years and film footage, there were loads of images available for the one-hour documentary about her life on RTÉ One on Tuesday.

Edna O’Brien, Life, Stories got access to her London home where we saw the Clare woman handwriting her novels and stories at a desk in a library room with a fire blazing in the hearth.

There was the impression that though she lived in expensive Chelsea, it was in a small house, possibly rented, because, she admitted, she wasn’t good with finances and might have been careless with it at times when she was in love. She had lived in a bigger house, one she owned, in a nicer part of Chelsea and still pined for it, she admitted in one of the few sincere moments. It’s not that she is at all fake, quite the opposite, but you do get the feeling she is guarded and not always herself on camera.

Married only once to the writer Ernest Gebler, who was 20 years older than her and a very controlling man with whom she had two sons, Carlo and Sasha, she tells us that she now knows she didn’t have the disposition for married love.

A quip she made about enjoying adultery now and again in a clip from an old TV show and her hint that Robert Mitchum may have been a love interest showed that she was a free spirit, one who was possibly ahead of her time.

At 81 and just months away from the publication of her memoirs in October, the red headed writer is engaging in a publicity campaign though this country’s fascination with her should guarantee profitable book sales, with or without such publicity.

She has not lost her Clare accent despite having lived in London since the early Sixties and her books continue to be of an Irish interest.

Having met her once during research on one of her books which involved written correspondence and phone calls in the early Nineties, she is today exactly as she was then.

Edna O’Brien is very much her own person, different, one who marches to her own tune but a woman who has a high emotional intelligence which makes her almost scary. I say this because she was highly perceptive during our meeting and made very direct personal observations which would have made someone else uncomfortable. I was in awe and, like half the country, have been fascinated ever since.

For more, read this week's Connacht Sentinel.