The hypocrisy of the Catholic Church, the female voice in literature, and the battle to save libraries were all discussed by acclaimed Irish author Edna O’Brien in a one off talk at heath Library.
The novelist, most famous for penning The Country Girls, was interviewed by broadcaster Piers Plowright at the embattled reading room in Keats Grove, Hampstead.
Mr Plowright said: “For a book written de cades ago it still has tremendous relevance, particularly to young women recognise something about sexual awakening and the power and bullying nature of men in her writing that perhaps hadn’t been said before.”
Mrs O’Brien, many of whose early works aroused great controversy and were even burnt by the Catholic Church, said she found it staggeringly hypocritical that the church had attacked her work while some of its priests were guilty of horrendous child abuse.
However the author, who is working on a theatre production of her most famous book The Country Girls in Ireland, revealed that she still attends mass.
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