arrestive
(əˈrestɪv)
adjective
tending to arrest or take hold of the attention, interest, etc.
Edna O’Brien, the prolific Irish author whose evocative and explicit stories of loves lost earned her a literary reputation that matched the darkly complex lives of her tragic heroines, died on Saturday. She was 93.
Ms. O’Brien wrote dozens of novels and short-story collections over almost 60 years, starting in 1960 with “The Country Girls,” a book that dealt with the emotional conflicts of two Irish girls who rebel against their Roman Catholic upbringing.
Her books often depicted willful but insecure women who loved men who were crass, unfaithful or already married. Much of her early work carried aspects of autobiography, which stirred whisperings about her morals and led to personal attacks against her back home in Ireland.
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Readers, particularly women, and critics in other countries, especially in the United States and Britain, found her work compelling, touching and truthful. She acquired a reputation as a woman given to frequent love affairs, but she maintained that having lovers did not make her promiscuous.
“I believe in love, not promiscuity, and they don’t go together,” she said in a 1995 New York Times interview. “I am a romantic. We’re very wise in our minds, but in our hearts we’re very turbulent.”
Most of all, she felt she should be judged on her writing, which could be crisp, intense and risky, or overwrought, indistinct and worthy of a Hallmark card. Some of her strongest efforts came when she used the banality of rural life to explore deep emotions.
In “House of Splendid Isolation” (1994), she wrote: “I think of the rows, rows over money, my husband putting on his cap to go out and escape from me, a black greasy cap that his ire had sweated into, bacon and cabbage, the dogs yelping for the leavings, downpours and in spite of it all there used to be inside me this river, an expectation for something marvelous. When did I lose it? When did it go? I want before I die to be myself again.”
Josephine Edna O’Brien was born on Dec. 15, 1930. (She once told an interviewer, “If I die and you write my obituary, don’t give my age.”) Her parents, Michael and Lena (Cleary) O’Brien, lived on a farm in Tuamgraney, a rural hamlet in County Clare that Ms. O’Brien described as “a very frightening and arrestive place.”
| Anthony DePalma, Edna O’Brien, Writer Who Gave Voice to Women’s Passions, Dies at 93