The Country Girls Trilogy and Epilogue [Hardcover]

Edna O'Brien (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 1, 1986 | Series: The Country Girls Trilogy

The Country Girls Trilogy and Epilogue is an absolutely engaging saga that is, thematically, about opposites - opposite dispositions and opposite views of life, the survivor versus the ungovernable romantic. It charts unflinchingly the pattern of life, for women, from the high spirits of youth to the chill of middle age, from hope to despair. It is both painful and hilarious.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Three novels by Edna O'brien that follow the lives of friends Kate and Baba from their school days and strict Roman Catholic upbringing in the Irish countryside to their disillusioned adulthood and failed marriages in London. The trilogy consists of The Country Girls (1960), The Lonely Girl (1962), and Girls in Their Married Bliss (1964). In 1986, the three novels with an epilogue were published in one volume as The Country Girls Trilogy and Epilogue. The trilogy concerns women enmeshed in their sexuality and almost inevitably destroyed by their dependence on men. Because of graphic sexual content and frank treatment of women's attitudes toward sexuality, the novels, and six of the author's subsequent works, were banned in Ireland. -- The Merriam-Webster Encylopedia of Literature

Product Details

• Hardcover: 544 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 1st edition (May 1, 1986)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374130272
• ISBN-13: 978-0374130275
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.2 x 1.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,230,203 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Edna O'Brien, the author of "The Country Girls" Trilogy, "The Light of Evening," and "Byron in Love," is the recipient of the James Joyce Ulysses Medal, and an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in London.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

58 of 60 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I Bought it for Ireland, but read it for Women, March 1, 2001

By 

CherishRa (the Mid-South) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Country Girls Trilogy and Epilogue (Mass Market Paperback)

I bought this book preparatory to a month in Ireland, as a mental/political exercise (aware of former banning). I couldn't put it down, and got three hours or less sleep for three nights in a row. I foisted it on my mom with warnings not to begin it on a weeknight, she got hooked on a Tuesday and went downhill too. We talked for days about how tightly written it was, how clean, spare, descriptive, full of foreshadowing, and painful to any woman who knows what it is to be centally disappointed by a man. Yet the book never whines, it never pushes itself sobbing on your shoulder. It sits in dignity with sadness.

Very quietly and methodically tragic, in the Irish way that says you do not whine about tragedy, you do not make fuss of it, you just simply pray a bit and go on. What makes the book so very valuable and unusual is that it applies the Irish knack for storytelling and forthright 'un-tragic' tragedy to women's lives and women's stories. It is both an Irish book full of water and woodsmoke, and a women's book in all its painful honesty and revelatory grace.

Please read.

43 of 47 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Absolutely brilliant - but harrowing., March 21, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Country Girls Trilogy and Epilogue (Mass Market Paperback)

If you happen to think that being Irish would be just the nicest cosiest thing in the world, and you want to keep thinking that, then don't read this book. If you want to read a genuine unputdownable masterpiece, though, and laugh and cry your way from the first page to the last, then go for it.

I might also add, though, that if you're a husband, like me, it's only fair to warn you that this book will search your conscience pretty thoroughly.

23 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars breath of fresh air, February 9, 2000

By 

Elizabeth T. Johnson (south carolina) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Country Girls Trilogy and Epilogue (Mass Market Paperback)

i heard an interview with edna o'brien on npr's FRESH AIR and was impressed with her style. i read the trilogy because of the interview, not because of the Ireland component. this book is poignant, funny, sincere, a page-turner, and honest. i keep looking at the copyright date and not believing that it was written years ago. this book is a definite breath of fresh air!