Coming of age in Catholic Ireland: Edna O’Brien’s Country Girl

I finished reading Edna O’Brien’s Country Girl on the plane back to Milan last week. Considering      how much      the memoir is bound up with place, spiralling out from rural Clare to Dublin, London and further afield and coming back again (sort of) to Ireland, it seemed fitting to be reading it while on my own travels. Having read a couple of the original Country Girls novels a few years ago, I was really curious to read the book for the insights it might offer into living in 1950s Ireland. Edna O’Brien was also born in 1930, her life spanning the same years as my ‘post-war generation’ of Italians coming of age in the 1950s, although Ireland was quite a different place to Italy, with its experience of economic boom and rapid social change in the late 1950s and 1960s.

The early chapters on growing up as a child in 1930s and 1940s Ireland gave a real sense of a middle-class rural existence in the late 1930s and early 1940s, from the idyllic childhood memories of the countryside to the social claustrophobia of small town Ireland in the 1940s. The convent school that Edna O’Brien attended as a boarder is also described as a curiously self-contained world with its own peculiar rules, customs and lexicon. The descriptions of life as a young woman in 1950s Dublin were fascinating too; Edna began her career as a writer by writing a weekly column on Dublin’s social scene for a trade magazine, and the extracts she quotes from here offer some sense of Dublin’s more vibrant, fashionable side, as well as the stagnant and heavily Catholic atmosphere of 1950s Ireland which has by now become cliché. Edna O’Brien manages to give a sense of what it was live to actually live in this sort of society; to want to keep up with a changing wider world and yet find it difficult to completely let go of her inherited beliefs. The story of how she met and married her husband Ernest Gebler – causing scandal in her own family since he was already married – is a familiar one as she borrowed heavily from her own autobiography for the plots of her early novels. However the memoir gives a sense of what motivated her to write the way she did, beginning her career as a novelist in the early 1960s, while a young mother in London and looking back at her life in Ireland.

The later sections of the book were weaker, for me. The account of her life as an intellectual socialite in late 1960s and 1970s London seemed to descend into an exercise in celebrity name-dropping – if there is a single famous person who passed through London in the 1960s and failed to get a mention, they are probably feeling pretty left out by now! By the final sections, the narrative was getting increasingly fragmented and meandering too.

However, Country Girl did offer some real insights into its time and places, giving some sense of what it was like to grow up and come of age in 1940s and 1950s Ireland, and to life an unconventional life as a woman, intellectual and writer. For me, since I am studying memoirs for my own research on Italy, it also made me think about memory, subjectivity and self in autobiographical writing; the slippery ways in which these work and the importance of place to memory and identity.

Confessions of a wannabe early modernist…

Watching television at the bar in 1950s Italy

I’ve been thinking lately about why certain historical periods seem to get all the attention. For the topics I’m most interested in – emotions, fashion, the city and gendered spaces, consumption – much of the recent scholarly attention focuses on the early modern period. Some of the most exciting work – the studies that try to reconceptualise history and look for new ways of examining how people’s minds, lives, living spaces and communities worked – seems to be happening there. While I love reading great books and articles that are outside my period – the more different and apparently random the better sometimes – I do wonder, as a contemporary historian, why so much of the innovation seems to be happening in much earlier centuries.

Love in the time of miracles

The following advice was given to a reader of the popular Italian magazine Grand Hotel who wrote in 1955 with the pseudonym ‘Gone with the wind’, and it manages to capture in a few words, the complex meanings and expectations associated with love and marriage in 1950s Italy.

“It wouldn’t have been very nice of you to marry (the first man) just to have a comfortable life. As for the other one, if he really loved you and had serious intentions, he would be able to persuade his parents to break his obligation. Be careful then dear, (…) neither a marriage of convenience nor a clandestine relationship with a man who is engaged to another. You’ll be left with empty hands and a bitter smile.”

Worthless escapism or a part of history? Women’s magazines in 1950s Italy

I’ve been spending the last few weeks reading through women’s magazines from the 1950s, in particular an illustrated weekly called Grand Hotel, one of the biggest-selling fotoromanzo or photo-story magazines that such had great success in 1950s Italy. New technologies were making it possible to mass-produce magazines that heavily featured colour photography and illustration, and the fotoromanzi, with their unique blend of serialized, illustrated stories – always melodramatic and always about love – met with huge popularity in these years. Their highly visual nature also appealed to the less educated. Readers could also write into the magazine with their (mostly romantic) problems so that we get glimpses not just of what Italians were reading but also of what how it related to their own lives. They have been traditionally dismissed as rags read by rural southern women, not literate enough to read anything else and too poor or isolated to go to the cinema for their fix of escapist entertainment.

The post-war generation: Growing up and coming of age in 1950s Italy

Italy in the late 1940s was still struggling to absorb the experience of war and to move beyond the crippling legacies of fascism, occupation and civil war. Poverty and deprivation were acute, particularly in the rural south and north-east. Peasant women still dressed in grim floor length blank skirts and dresses, spending most of their lives in mourning clothes, and donkeys not cars were still the accepted mode of transport. The infrastructure of many cities – Rome, Naples, Milan, Turin, Genoa – was nearly destroyed by bombing while poverty and disease dominated life in Naples and the rural south.

For anyone living through these bleak times, it must have been difficult to comprehend just how much Italy would change in the course of a decade. From the late 1950s to the early 1960s, Italian society was transformed by an economic boom so strong it was dubbed a ‘miracle’.