SOURCE: "Love Objects: Love and Obsession in the Stories and Edna O'Brien," in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 30, No. 3, Summer, 1993, pp. 317-25.

In the following essay, O'Hara surveys O'Brien's handling of obsessive love in her short stories.

I am obsessed quite irrationally by the notion of love …," writes Edna O'Brien. "It's an obsession and I know it's very limiting. At the same time it's what I feel truest and most persistently about, and therefore it's the thing that I have to write about" [Patrick Rafroidi and Maurice Harmon, editors, The Irish Novel in Our Time, Publications de L'Université de Lille III, 1975–76]. And write about it she does—the obsession, that is, perhaps more than the love.

A reading of O'Brien's stories, beginning with the 1969 collection, The Love Object, reveals that several of her characters share their author's obsession with "the notion of love." Yet between these women and...