Edna O’Brien: Dickens, Brontë, Austen…

Edna O’Brien is an award-winning Irish author of novels, plays, and short stories, and the winner of Give a Book’s The Pleasure of Reading Prize, 2022.

Edna’s winner’s speech included a celebration of her favourite authors and works of literature, each earning a very well deserved place on our Book of the Month list!

Read Edna’s wonderful winner’s speech in full, here, or purchase some of the undeniable classics mentioned below from our *Bookshop, here.

Bleak House, by Charles Dickens

I think of Bleak House, of Dickens, that master conjuror, who had the verve, the audacity, the genius to lift Inspector Bucket to the very highest tower of his imagination. It is not what we might have expected, but for Dickens, and all great writers, there are no boundaries.

The Brontë Sisters

The books I loved at an early age perhaps informed my more intense likings. Scores of women were drawn to the Bronte Sisters, to their shriven fates in that freezing parsonage in Haworth, where there remains on display their little slippers so that a visitor can easily see that their feet were a size three or four. Tiny creatures whose dreamings, which is to say their writings, blazed with passion and are saturate with tales of unrealised love, love that in its way is deathless, since it declares itself from beyond the grave.

Jane Austen

Alternatively, and at the same time, there was Miss Jane Austen, with her crisp, sensible, unfettered approach—‘Miss Maria Ward of Huntingdon with only seven thousand pounds, had the good luck to captivate Sir Thomas Bertram.’

These are the authors, and dozens more, whose rooms have become part of my inner mythology, my life, and my solitude.

---

Thank you, Edna for recommending these authors.

Our Books Of The Month are sent to our projects with a bookplate sharing why it was chosen.

You can order your copy of the above books, and our previous BOTMs, from our *Bookshop, here.

*Give a Book is an affiliate of Bookshop.org. Books purchased through our Bookshop lists and affiliate links earn Give a Book a small commission, which supports our projects and helps us give books to those who need them most. Thank you for supporting Give a Book!

To see our previous Books of the Month, click here.