Written in 1960, Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls broke the silence on sex in a socially repressive Ireland, seen through the lives of Kate and Baba, two young Irish country girls yearning for love who move from rural Ireland to Dublin to find it.
O’Brien’s debut novel so inflamed the authorities that the Irish censor banned it, the family’s parish priest in Co Clare ritually burned copies of the novel and, many years later, O’Brien learned that her mother had hidden her copy in a pillow case with the offending words covered in black ink.