The Country Girls Trilogy and Epilogue.

O'BRIEN, Edna [Erica Jong].

$400.00

Item Number: 142563

New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1986.

First edition of the omnibus edition of Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls Trilogy. Octavo, original half cloth. Signed by the author on the title page. From the library of Erica Jong. Jong remains best known for her 1973 novel Fear of Flying which became famously controversial for its portrayal of female sexuality and figured prominently in the development of second-wave feminism. Written in the first person and narrated by its protagonist, 29-year-old American poet Isadora Wing, Fear of Flying was written in the throes of the Sexual Revolution of the 1970s and encapsulated the movement’s redefinition of female sexuality. In interviews, Jong stated: “At the time I wrote Fear of Flying, there was not a book that said women are romantic, women are intellectual, women are sexual—and brought all those things together… What [Isadora is] looking for is how to be a whole human being, a body and a mind, and that is what women were newly aware they needed in 1973.” The novel remains a feminist classic and has sold more than 20 million copies worldwide. Fine in a near fine dust jacket. Jacket design by Jacqueline Schuman.

Irish novelist Edna O'Brien's first novel, The Country Girls (1960), is often credited with breaking silence on sexual matters and social issues during a repressive period in Ireland following the Second World War and was adapted into a 1983 film. It was followed by two sequels The Lonely Girl (1962), and Girls in Their Married Bliss (1964). The trilogy was re-released in 1986 in a single volume with a revised ending to Girls in Their Married Bliss and addition of an epilogue. All three novels were banned by the Irish censorship board and faced significant public disdain in Ireland. O'Brien won the Kingsley Amis Award in 1962 for The Country Girls.