This trilogy was published in a single volume with added material (Epilogue) in 1986; it originally appeared as the separate volumes The Country Girls (1960), which was the author’s first published novel; The Lonely Girl (1962); and Girls in Their Married Bliss (1964).

In calling attention to the repression of women by the Catholic Church and by the Irish government, and in calling on Irish women to take possession of their own sexuality, the book created an adverse reaction in Ireland, the author’s native country: it was banned there, and copies were even burned in O’Brien’s hometown.

The narrative of the trilogy’s first volume features a double protagonist in Caithleen and Baba, two girls reared in the strict convent tradition of devout Catholics in Ireland, who are both longing to move into the modern world of Dublin. Caithleen is the first-person narrator, a shy young woman who longs to find a fulfilling love; Baba is her hot-tempered and demanding best friend. When Caithleen’s mother drowns, the girls are boarded at a convent until Baba’s outrageous behavior gets them expelled. Like drowning, the convent is also a metaphor for the submersion of female existence and the termination of an individual woman’s identity. O’Brien returns to this image of submerged death many years after completing the trilogy, bringing one of the protagonists to a similar end.

After the oppressive convent life, the girls are thrilled to go to Dublin, where Baba enters a business school and Cait works in a grocery store. But they have traded small-town frustration for modern urban loneliness. For Cait in particular, love seems impossible because the majority of the men she meets are too badly flawed or damaged to provide a meaningful relationship. The novel leaves Cait with dampened hopes but still with some optimism that she will find love, and in The Lonely Girl, set two years later in Dublin, she enters into a relationship with Eugene Gaillard (perhaps an unsympathetic portrait of O’Brien’s own husband). The relationship leaves Cait herself feeling damaged, and the two friends leave Ireland for London at the novel’s end.

Five years later, when Baba and Kate (Caithleen’s Anglicized name) are about 25 years old, their story resumes in The Girls in Their Married Bliss, but now Baba becomes the novel’s narrator, with additional passages of observation narrated in the third person. The two friends live in London and are married, but both of them are disillusioned with men and disheartened by their marriages. Baba has chosen material comfort over personal fulfillment, and Kate’s bitter experience in her failing marriage leads her to elect voluntary sterilization.

When O’Brien returned to this story more than 20 years later, when the three books were published in a single volume, she continued her negative perspective on the prospects for women trying to fill the roles laid out for them in a patriarchal society. The country girls mature, but they do so at the cost of their dreams and hopes, turning to despair, indifference, and even self-destruction.

Bibliography
Eckley, Grace. Edna O’Brien. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1974.
Irwin, Archibald E. “Give Us Baba,” Irish Literary Supplement (Spring 1987): 19.

Categories: British Literature, Literature, Novel Analysis

Tags: 20th-century Irish novels, banned books Ireland, Caithleen and Baba, Catholic Church repression, convent school fiction, Dublin in fiction, Edna O'Brien's The Country Girls, Edna O’Brien, Edna O’Brien banned books, Edna O’Brien controversy, Eugene Gaillard character, female coming-of-age story, female sexuality in literature, feminist literature, gender roles in fiction, Irish cultural criticism, Irish diaspora in fiction, Irish feminism, Irish government censorship, Irish Literature, Irish women writers, literary portrayal of marriage, London in Irish fiction, patriarchy in literature, postwar Irish society, The Country Girls Trilogy, voluntary sterilization in literature, women’s disillusionment, women’s friendship in novels, women’s identity, women’s struggle for autonomy