I am not entirely certain of this, but I suspect this may be the first documentary film I have ever seen in a cinema. It is certainly the first I have reviewed. And what a terrific documentary to choose.

Directed by Sinéad O’Shea, it tells the story of Edna O’Brien, one of Ireland’s most controversial and important novelists. The film tells her life story from her birth into “a strict, religious family” in rural County Clare in 1930, moving on to her marriage to the Irish writer Ernest Gébler in 1954, against her family’s wishes. However, it was not a happy marriage, and when her first novel, The Country Girls, was published in 1960, the writing was on the wall, although the marriage limped on for another four years before she finally left him. The film then charts her astonishing career over the next sixty years, during which she published eighteen novels, eight short story collections, eight plays, a poetry collection and a host of children’s books and non-fiction books.

However, it is not just her writing that was important but the astonishing life she led. Her early books were banned in Ireland for many years, primarily thanks to the malevolent influence of the Roman Catholic Church. She is described in the film as a ‘Bon Vivant’. Her London parties were attended by the great and the good of the literary and acting worlds. She was very outspoken about sex from a woman’s perspective, and very scathing about the contribution of men. She had relationships with a number of famous film stars, and an affair with a very senior British politician which lasted many years.

Scottish novelist Andrew O’Hagan, who is interviewed in the film, said: “She changed the nature of Irish fiction; she brought the woman’s experience and sex and internal lives of those people on to the page, and she did it with style, and she made those concerns international.” 

The documentary uses her diaries, her many public appearances on arts programmes (interviewed by the likes of Russell Harty, Melvyn Bragg, and so on), comments from other writers, including Anne Enright and Walter Moseley, and testament from her two children, Carlo and Sasha. It also includes an extended interview undertaken for the film by Ms O’Brien in 2023 and 2024, shortly before her death.

I have to confess that I knew only a little of her astonishing life and have barely scratched the surface of her work: I have read only one of her novels: The Red Chairs, which I loved, and which was written when she was 85; I saw two of her plays: Triptych (purely by chance, I happened to be in San Francisco on the day it opened there) and Joyce’s Women; I have seen adaptations of The Country Girls and The Lonely Girl (The Girl with Green Eyes); And I have read her biography of James Joyce.

Sinéad O’Shea’s excellent documentary has opened my eyes to a hugely important and powerfully intellectual woman writer – I will be reading a lot more in the near future!