The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor

It's the birthday of the authoress called by Philip Roth "the most gifted woman now writing in English": Edna O'Brien, (books by this author) born in County Clare, Ireland (1932). Newsweek described her as having "the soul of Molly Bloom and the skills of Virginia Woolf." She grew up in a "non-book owning family"; once her mom found a book by Irish playwright Sean O'Casey (books by this author) in Edna's luggage and wanted to set fire to it.

She went to pharmacy school. But by the time she'd gotten her license, she knew she wanted to dedicate herself to writing. She was working in a chemist's shop in Dublin when she discovered a slender volume called Introducing James Joyce: a selection of Joyce's prose,with an introduction by T.S. Eliot. She later said: "I opened it to a section from Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the Christmas dinner scene, with the blue flame over the Christmas pudding. Up to then, I had been writing rather fancifully, with a lot of adjectives. When I read that, I realized one thing: that I need go no further than my own interior, my own experience, for whatever I wanted to write. It was truly, without sounding like St. Paul, an utter revelation to me." To this day, Edna O'Brien keeps the book handy, its yellow hardcover now faded. Inside, she inscribed it: "A Book that taught me more than any other about writing. Purchased for sixpence in Bachelor's Walk in 1950 or 1951."

She was in her 20s when she wrote and published her first book, Country Girls (1960). She'd received a £50 advance for it, which she blew right away, and then she sat down and wrote the book in just three weeks. It immediately made her famous — and in Ireland, particularly infamous. The book was banned there for allegedly "smearing Irish womanhood." She said, "I was accused of betraying my country, my locality, my sex. The nuns in my convent went bonkers with rage." At her home parish in the west of Ireland, a priest called out from the pulpit for anyone possessing a copy of the book to bring it back to that church that night so the copies could be burned. People said nasty things to her mother. Edna O'Brien's mother never, to the end, approved of her daughter's choice of writing as career.

O'Brien moved to London and has spent her life in exile there. But like her hero James Joyce, (books by this author) she continued to write about the land she had exiled herself from. She once said: "James Joyce lived all his life away and wrote obsessively and gloriously about Ireland. Although he had left Ireland bodily, he had not left it psychically, no more than I would say I have."

Ten years ago, she wrote a biography of Joyce — just 192 pages long — for the Penguin Lives series. James Joyce by Edna O'Brien begins:

"Once upon a time there was a man coming down a road in Dublin and he gave himself the name of Dedalus the sorcerer, constructor of labyrinths and maker of wings for Icarus who flew so close to the sun that he fell, as the apostolic Dubliner James Joyce would fall deep into a world of words — from the "epiphanies" of youth to the epistomadologies of later years.

James Joyce, poor joist, a funnominal man, supporting a gay house in a slum of despond. His name derived from the Latin and meant joy but at times he thought himself otherwise — a jejune Jesuit spurning Christ's terrene body, a lecher, a Christian brother in luxuriousness, a Joyce of all trades, a bullock-befriending bard, a peerless mummer, a priestified kinchite, a quill-frocked friar, a timoneer, a pool-beg flasher and a man with the gift of the Irish majuscule script."

Edna O'Brien is now on the faculty at University College Dublin, where Joyce was a student more than 100 years ago. This year, she published a biography on Lord Byron, entitled Byron in Love: A Short Daring Life (2009).