Feminism, autofiction, and Edna O'Brien's Country Girls trilogy volume 2

The second volume of Edna O'Brien's Country Girls trilogy, The Lonely Girl (1962, at one time published as The Girl with Green Eyes) follows up on the life of Caithleen Brady as she and her best friend, the more loquacious Baba, are kicked out of the convent school and w/ their parents' OK head off from small-village central Ireland to find work in Dublin. The time is probably early 1950s, though it's not made clear, and at the outset CB is 21 years old; when we saw her last she had been ditched by her first lover, whom she calls Mr. Gentleman (much older than she, married, obviously exploiting a young teenage girl who lives with no protection from her alcoholic, disengaged father). In the 2nd volume, the pattern of her life continues, as she meets a man - a documentary filmmaker - at least twice her age, far more sophisticated and well educated, recently divorced - at least he's not married - and a father of a child whom he never mentions (that's a warning sign in itself), a wealthy squire living in the beautiful countryside on the outskirts of Dublin. So once again she falls for a man, Eugene, who has a sort of Pygmalian fantasy - he'll educate her and show her the ways of the world - but who obviously has no interest in her except for the sex - her first sexual intercourse, as we learn. The crisis point in this volume occurs when CB's father arrives at E's house with a bunch of village thugs, threatening E and eventually beating him up. From CB's POV (and E's as well of course) they are invading his privacy and the daughter is an emancipated adult and they should leave her alone; from our POV, however, the daughter is in a horrible and exploitative relationship that will come to no good end (for her) and we sympathize with the father's goal, if not w/ his brutal threats and actions. The character CB has little self-awareness, and EO'B doesn't impose her own reflective judgement on CB, who narrates the story of her life with a cool dispassion. Today, mostly likely, EO'B would have written this trilogy as a memoir (we have to believe that she is one and the same, a few details aside, as her narrator) or a work of auto-fiction. She seems quite aware of her youthful attractiveness, especially to older men, but she's strangely unaware of the imbalance in these relationships and in the degree to which the men she falls for will love her and discard her, like a used Kleenex. Today, this might have been written from more of a feminist vantage, but as it stands I for one can't help but think that the narrator has it all wrong: These men are poison.