There is a body of opinion that has it that Edna O'Brien is overrated as a writer; that her success is due to the sex and Irish blarney in her work, and that any serious criticism of her books is out of place….

If I am daft enough to put my head on the block again, it is because there really is something about the Edna O'Brien phenomenon that is worth defining.

With the passing of time, her settings have become more sophisticated…. In this collection of classic O'Brien stories … ["A Rose in the Heart"], there is an awareness of death not generally associated with this elegiac but most life-loving author. Graveyards are dwelt on, and the barriers between life and death are thin. In "Ways," the Vermont cemetery "seems integral to the town as if the living and the dead are wedded to one another." In "Baby Blue," the heroine grieves for "all those who were in boxes alone or together above or below ground, all those unable to accept their afflicted selves."

The "afflicted selves," however, who dominate these stories, find solace in earthly delights. Miss O'Brien is like Colette in her pleasured cataloguing of flowers, smells, landscapes, food and drink; these genderless sensualities heal and comfort the ladies whose love lives are awry.

Most of the stories spotlight particular phases in a sexual relationship; sometimes its consummation—"her body flooded open"—more often edgy beginnings or dismal endings. There is a wonderful resilience in the heroines, a readiness to expect Prince Charming. (p. 7)

There is also an unabashed acceptance of need, as in "Ways": "All she wants is for the man to come up and nuzzle her and hold her and temporarily squeeze all the solitude out of her." And yet in "Ways," as in two other of these stories, the woman runs out on the promising affair. Solitude, it seems, is often preferable to risking or inflicting pain.

The most powerful story here is not chiefly about sexual love at all. "A Rose in the Heart of New York" traces a daughter's relationship with her mother, from babyhood to her mother's death, with a high-pressure intensity and concentration. The least successful, for me, is "Clara," the narrator of which is a foreign entrepreneur in Ireland—a man. I never believed in him for a moment. Edna O'Brien's vision is preternaturally sharp for everything that grows—or wilts—in her own secret garden. Outside it, she is in the dark.

This singleness of focus is both her strength and her weakness. And by conventional standards she does not write "well." She writes, often, very badly. Her punctuation is all to hell, and she abuses both grammar and vocabulary. This is not because she has consciously decided to "remake" the language. Indeed, her unself-consciousness is the point. It is as if her fantasies, her elaborations of what happened, or what didn't happen, or what might have happened are projected in an undoctored tragicomic flow. It is this authenticity that is the key to her quality and makes her a best seller.

It is also what irritates her critics. Because her fantasies are, necessarily, part of the common stock, people—especially women—say "Any of us could have written about that." But we couldn't. What she has, and what many more highly educated, self-consciously literary writers would give their eyeteeth for, is a direct line between her own yeasty, mazy imaginings and her pen. And if some of what comes out is trite and second-rate, that is because human emotions are often commonplace. And if now, after years as a writer, she has learned consciously and professionally to harness this un-self-consciousness to her artful purposes, then more power to her elbow. (p. 22)