Edna O'Brien is regarded today as one of Ireland's most eminent writers. Declan Kiberd, for instance, has referred to her prose style as one of ‘surpassing beauty and exactitude’. Such accolades, however, are a relatively recent phenomenon. It is only in the last ten to fifteen years that substantial critical attention has been paid to her work, largely due to the endeavours of feminist scholars. Most criticism of O'Brien's work has been from the perspective of gender and sexuality, something which is not surprising given the subject-matter of her early work. For critics who read her through psychoanalytical theory, it is an unresolved relationship with the mother that is the key to her work. Heather Ingman, for instance, has explored how the dual discourse of nation and motherhood in Ireland underpins many of O'Brien's characterizations. This is something which resonates in her depictions of Irish migrant women, particularly in respect to how their love affairs often reignite unresolved issues in their relationships with their mothers.

O'Brien's relationship with her own mother was a troubled one and in much of her work migration provides a backdrop against which relationships between mothers and daughters are closely examined. In this regard, the escape from Ireland which many of her protagonists enact through migration takes on a distinct maternal dimension, alluded to by O'Brien as ‘another birth, a further breach of waters’. The autobiographical content of her novels has long been a subject of interest, and in recent studies there has been a distinct focus on the subject of O'Brien's public persona and how this has affected the reception of her novels.