Edna O'Brien and the Five of Pentacles

Edna O’Brien, born in 1930 in Tuamgraney, County Clare, is one of Ireland’s most formidable literary voices — a woman who transformed the landscape of Irish fiction by daring to tell the truth about women’s lives in a country where silence was sacrosanct.

Her debut novel, “The Country Girls” (1960), was a literary sensation — and a scandal. It was banned by the Irish Censorship Board for its frank depiction of female sexuality and desire. Copies were reportedly burned by a local priest in her home parish, and she was publicly condemned by the Catholic Church. What was an act of creative liberation for Edna was seen by the Irish establishment as a betrayal of national and religious values. She wrote honestly about things that were not meant to be spoken of — not by women, and certainly not in public.

Exiled in London for most of her adult life, Edna paid a personal price for her boldness. Estranged from her homeland for decades, she nevertheless remained deeply connected to Ireland in her writing. Her work returned again and again to themes of repression, identity, love, violence, and exile — not as abstract concepts but as lived, bruising realities.

Despite the early backlash, Edna’s brilliance could not be ignored. Over the decades, she built a huge body of work — novels, plays, short stories, and memoir — acclaimed for its lyricism, emotional depth, and courage. From “A Pagan Place” to “The Little Red Chairs”, her writing charts the difficult terrain between personal truth and collective shame, particularly in a society shaped by patriarchal control and religious dogma.

Her later novels fearlessly explore topics like clerical abuse and female trauma — long before these became national conversations. Edna was writing these truths when it was dangerous to do so, and she did it with grace, clarity, and defiance.

Now widely recognised as one of Ireland’s literary giants, Edna has received numerous awards, including the Irish PEN Lifetime Achievement Award and the French Prix Femina. In 2021, she was made a member of the Order of the Companions of Honour by Queen Elizabeth II for her contribution to literature.

What makes Edna remarkable is not only her talent, but her resilience — her willingness to speak against the tide, to endure exile and criticism, and to keep writing. She opened the door for a generation of Irish women writers to come after her — writers who no longer had to choose between truth and acceptance.

The Five of Pentacles

The Five of Pentacles is one of the most emotionally charged cards in the tarot. At its core, it speaks of hardship — not just financial or physical loss, but often deeper, more human experience of rejection, isolation, and disgrace.

In the traditional imagery, two figures limp through the snow outside a church window glowing with warmth and light. They are injured, cold, and overlooked. This card represents the feeling of being shut out — not just from comfort, but from belonging. There may be a sense of alienation, of not fitting in, or being cast aside by a group, community, or belief system. The Five of Pentacles reflects how society treats those who have fallen, and how deeply we may internalise our perceived unworthiness.

Edna’s life and work echo the haunting imagery of the Rider-Waite card: two figures trudging through the snow, wounded, overlooked, exiled — moving past the warm glow of a church window from which they are barred. Edna, too, was cast out into the cold by the very institutions that were supposed to offer warmth: her Church, her community, and her country.

When Edna published “The Country Girls” in 1960, she shattered the veneer of Irish respectability by writing with unflinching honesty about women’s interior lives. For this act of truth-telling, she was denounced from the pulpit, her books were banned by the Irish Censorship Board, and in a notorious act of symbolic violence, they were burned in the parish grounds in her hometown, after the rosary.

Like the figures in the Five of Pentacles, Edna became an outsider — not for a crime, but for speaking what was not supposed to be spoken. Her exile from Ireland was not only physical but spiritual: she was effectively cast out of Catholic Ireland, not just geographically but ideologically, pushed beyond the pale of what was considered respectable, moral, or Irish. In this sense, she embodies the themes of isolation, ignominy, and alienation that the card so powerfully conveys.

And yet — like the card itself, which holds within its bleakness the faint suggestion of refuge, of light still shining behind stained glass — Edna found freedom in exile. In London, she continued to write, defiantly and beautifully, building a career that spanned decades and defied her censors. Her hardship became fuel, her rejection a kind of terrible liberation. The warmth she was denied at home, she forged for herself in prose.

The Five of Pentacles, then, is not just a symbol of Edna’s suffering — it is a portrait of her resilience. She walked through the snow. She bore the wounds. And she kept going.

Where many would have stayed silent, Edna wrote. In doing so, she became a guide for others lost in the same cold — showing that even when cast out, a voice can still burn bright, and truth can survive the storm.

Sources

• The Economist’s Obituary, 2024/07/3

• “Conversations with Edna O'Brien,” ed. Alice Hughes Kernowski, University Press of Mississippi, 2014.

• “Edna O'Brien. Irish Writers Series.” Eckley, Grace. Lewisburg, Bucknell University Press, 1974..

• “Twentieth-Century Women Novelists.” Staley, Thomas F., ed. London: Macmillan, 1982.