David R. Walker

Archive for June 5th, 2025

Blue Road: The Edna O’Brien Story

Director: Sinead O’Shea

Cast: Jessie Buckley, Gabriel Byrne

Running Time: 1 hour 39 minutes

Film Rating: 8 out of 10

Please note this film is a documentary.

Oscar nominated Irish actress Jessie Buckley (The Lost Daughter) serves as the competent narrator with her clear and quirky commentary on life of Irish novelist Edna O’Brien in Sinead O’Shea’s riveting documentary Blue Road: The Edna O’Brien Story which is a must see film.

Blue Road: The Edna O’Brien Story tells the scandalous story of writer Edna O’Brien who was a gifted novelist but got married very young to a much older Irish writer Ernest Gebler and had two small children in 1954. At a time of non-existent women writers that were telling tales of the sexual frankness and desires of young Irish women, Edna O’Brien’s early novels The Country Girls, Girls in their Married Bliss and August is a Wicked Month caused a major stir and were immediately banned in the conservative Ireland of the early 1960’s.

What made her initial fame even more precarious was that her husband took all her royalty checks from the publication of her first couple of novels and kept them himself. He gave Edna an allowance for groceries.

Then Edna O’Brien as a novelist who by 1964 was earning enough money from her writing to become independent made the bold decision to leave her husband and move into a house in the fashionable Carlyle Square in SW1 in London. Edna and her dreadful husband were divorced in 1968 after a four year separation.

Edna O’Brien as a controversial novelist who challenged the patriarchy in Anglo-Irish society and also expertly exposed the sexual desires of young women in her ground breaking novels became a cause celeb and was the centre of a bohemian social whirl in the 1960’s that included film stars and celebrities like Robert Mitchum, Sean Connery, Joan Plowright and even Jackie Onassis.

O’Brien’s popularity as a novelist was cemented in America after the endorsement by prestigious writers like Philip Roth, John Updike and J. D. Salinger in the 1970’s and 1980’s. Heavily influenced by Irish modernist writer James Joyce, Edna O’Brien’s fame as a novelist was firmly established.

Irish documentary film maker Sinead O’Shea creates an impressive and elegant story of the life of Edna O’Brien in her brilliant documentary Blue Road: The Edna O’Brien Story which had its world premiere at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival. Unfortunately Edna O’Brien passed away in July 2024 just three months before the release of this fascinating story of her provocative life.

Featuring interviews with famous Irish actor Gabriel Byrne (The Usual Suspects, Vanity Fair, Siesta) Blue Road: The Edna O’Brien Story is an interesting documentary on a female writer whose sexual frankness initially shocked conservative Anglo-Irish society and left a literary legacy which any avid reader should explore more thoroughly.

Documentaries on the lives of writers can be difficult to make but ably assisted with the tantalizing commentary provided by Jessie Buckley, director Sinead O’Shea brings to the cinema the life of a bold independent woman of letters whose novels scandalized the English speaking world and earned Edna O’Brien the moniker Playgirl of the Western World.

If audiences love literary documentaries then Blue Road: The Edna O’Brien story is highly recommended viewing and gets a film rating of 8 out of 10. An insightful film both politically and socially.