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“... different, to reject argument in favour of a more anarchic and truthful form. I thought of what Edna O’Brien told the Paris Review: ‘Fuck the plot! That is for precocious schoolboys. What matters is the imaginative truth.’ What does argument – a thesis, a resolution, a lesson – have to do with the ambiguities of trying to get and stay ...”

“... the depth of her feeling. He was rueful about his tussles with his co-panellists Mary McCarthy and Edna O’Brien when chairing the Booker in 1973. He had wanted The Dressmaker to win. J.G. Farrell’s The Siege of Krishnapur – incidentally, the only book by a man on the shortlist – got the award. When I was on the panel in 1990, I wanted An Awfully ...”

“... calling them ‘nosey bastards’, slamming the window shut. She belts Janice when she brings home Edna O’Brien from the library: ‘I can’t read this. She knows damn well.’ And then, she does something so nasty with an ice cream, it’s like a moment from a Tarantino movie, except that it trembles with the unsureness, uncertainty, reality, that ...”

“... and pleasures of sex. The lack is especially glaring in relation to women. Only when she read Edna O’Brien did she understand that ‘there was a part of women’s lives that had been absent in everything I had read.’ ‘Bored’ (her word) with the way sex is mostly written about, she has now given us two novels in which language falls apart ...”

“... reference to the work of women imaginative writers.’ So into the witness-box come successively Edna O’Brien, Margaret Drabble, Penelope Mortimer, Doris Lessing, Iris Murdoch. In the case of three, perhaps four, of the witnesses nothing is said about how they give their evidence. In the two years that Rebecca West was contributing to the ...”

“... an Irish story about the despoiling of a young girl’s first love, which seems to look forward to Edna O’Brien or Claire Keegan. Barbie is living one summer with her uncle, in a sensual dream of happiness, in love with him without knowing it. He sends her to pay a visit to his neighbour, a thwarted, fascinating, clever woman his own age, who also wants ...”

“... performance as the nation’s First Lady.’ Jackie made contact with the Irish novelist Edna O’Brien when O’Brien’s play about Virginia Woolf was in rehearsal in New York. O’Brien wrote about her: So many of her qualities – that breathless enthusiasm, a certain ...”

“... too social, somehow, to describe the kind of deafness I want to identify (though it is true that Edna O’Brien, as beautiful and sexy on the page as in life, really was chased out of town). It’s hard to remember what it was like back in 2013, but I seem to recall that you couldn’t complain then without being told that other people had it ...”

“... contemporary literary figures. Here is Dennis Potter on 17 May, Michael Frayn on 8 September, Edna O’Brien on 15 December, and so naturally I turn to my own birthday. May 9 is blank except for the note: ‘The first British self-service launderette is opened on Queensway, London 1949.’4 January. George F. tells me that when Andrew Lloyd ...”

“... caring: they included the novelists Janet Hobhouse, Alison Lurie and Mary Karr; her royal highness Edna O’Brien; the journalists Janet Malcolm and Claudia Roth Pierpont; the biographers Judith Thurman and Hermione Lee. Some of them would be with him till the end, at his hospital bed in the cardiac intensive care unit at New York-Presbyterian. Being ...”

“... appreciatively at his jokes. He was interviewed for the Observer colour supplement and kissed by Edna O’Brien, but privately, as the letters reveal, he was disturbed by recognition. Kathleen Raine’s admiration made him uneasy – ‘it must surely be (for what I would think) the wrong reason’ – and of his poetry in general he wondered: ‘Who ...”

“... with him except through his work and it has always seemed phoney to me.’ On the novelist Kate O’Brien: ‘I find literary people bore me to almost the point of violence.’ On Austin Clarke, the reigning high priest of Irish poetry: ‘a sentimentalist gone sour’.Among McGahern’s circle was the painter Patrick Swift, who in 1960 was in ...”

“... life. I’m not suggesting we should read them as Irish realism, in the mode of John McGahern or Edna O’Brien, but Keane herself makes clear that the baroque world of her fiction, in which sex was transgression and harm could not be acknowledged, was as much a portrait of upper-class England and everyday Ireland as it was of the Anglo-Irish. The ...”

“... Carter was often vehement in her dislike of slightly older women writers, such as Joan Didion, Edna O’Brien and Jean Rhys, whom she claimed to find victim-like. Such women also, one can’t help but notice, had the fragile slightness her mother had but she didn’t, in their bodies and in their works. Even after giving birth herself, Ward Jouve ...”

“... in 1974, which is late for the scholarship pupil plot in Britain and Ireland. John McGahern, Edna O’Brien, Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams: they were all born between the end of the First World War and the early 1930s, and published their stories of class alienation in the late 1950s and early 1960s. It’s a bit late, too, for the middle-class ...”