Obituary: Edna O’Brien, the controversial Irish novelist

She was also lambasted for a profile of Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams that she wrote for the New York Times in 1994.

“I was asked, ‘Am I a groupie?’ I’m nobody’s groupie,” she said.

Edward Pearce, writing in the Guardian in the same year, called her “the Barbara Cartland of long-distance republicanism”.

She continued to write well into her old age, saying that she would die if she could not do so. In 2018, O’Brien was made an honorary Dame of the British Empire.

She will be remembered as a woman who changed the nature of Irish fiction.

In the words of her fellow novellist, Andrew O’Hagan, “she brought the woman’s experience, and sex and internal lives of those people on to the page, and she did it with style, and she made those concerns international”.

As a long-term exile from her native land, she had, nevertheless, Ireland to thank for her imagination and her gift.

It was one born of a childhood in the beauty and isolation of her mother country.

Without it, she said, “I wouldn’t have got the raw stuff. And the raw stuff is very good for the real stuff.”