Edna O’Brien and the Art of Fiction
by Maureen O’Connor
“Maureen O’Connor’s Edna O’Brien and the Art of Fiction does a lot of heavy lifting for one
single-authored volume. O’Connor’s sophisticated, meticulously researched assessment of
Ireland’s most eminent living practitioner of the art of fiction opens up new and enabling routes
across an overdetermined terrain that has rendered critical engagement with O’Brien’s oeuvre
strangely difficult. By bridging a series of mutually reinforcing quagmires in which O’Brien
criticism has been prone to bog down . . . O’Connor’s study clears the way for a new generation of Edna O’Brien scholarship.”
—Estudios Irlandeses, 2024