Edna O’Brien (1930-2024): A sensuous, sublime writer who wrote about women longing to escape boredom

“Is there a place for me in some part of your life?” a married man asks a woman in “Manhattan Medley,” a story in Edna O’Brien’s Saints and Sinners. By asking for a place not in someone’s life, but in a part of her life, the man suggests that he wants things to happen slowly, less dramatically than affairs usually do. By speaking of a sliver and not of the whole, he perhaps indicates too that, realistically, all that he can offer is a part of his own life.

“We did not have a garden, we had ploughed fields and meadows,” says a girl about her family in another story, “My Two Mothers.” “Somehow I thought that a garden would be a prelude to happiness.” Although she longs for the pleasures of a garden to call her own, the girl still seems to divine that her childish desires can be but a threshold to some ideal state, not happiness but a prelude to it. These are people who seem preternaturally aware, even when in the grip of heightened feeling, of how obdurate life is, of how something may be changed or attained only by small steps, not grand sallies. Even the children are, by...

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