NEW YORK, NY.- Decades before Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels, Irish writer Edna O’Brien — who died at 93 July 27 — provided her own searing portraits of an oppressive, violent society seen through the prism of female friendship.

When we first meet them in 1960’s “The Country Girls,” Kate and Baba are teenagers, dreaming of a future beyond the confines of their rural Irish village and strict convent school. Its sequels — “Girl With Green Eyes” (1962), and the ironically-titled “Girls in Their Married Bliss” (1964) — follow them through their first taste of womanhood in Dublin, then to London, where they struggle to reconcile their romantic fantasies with the frustrations of real marital life.

O’Brien was 29 when “The Country Girls” was published, living with two young sons and her then-husband, writer Ernest Gébler, in a small house in a bleak south London suburb to which they’d moved, two years earlier, from Ireland. The novel took her only three weeks to write, the words having “tumbled out,” as she recalled in her 2012 memoir, “Country Girl,” “like the oats on threshing day that tumble down the shaft, the hard pellets of oats funneled into bags and the chaff flying everywhere, getting into the men’s eyes and their having to shout to be heard above the noise of the machine.”

Although tame by today’s social mores, and praised on its publication by the English press, “The Country Girls” — with its candid portrayal of female sexuality and extramarital romance — sent shock waves through Ireland, where it was denounced by the church and banned by the Irish censorship board as “indecent.” Copies were even publicly burned.

Overnight, O’Brien became Ireland’s most notorious exiled daughter, and its foremost chronicler of female experience. “No writer in English is so good at putting the reader inside the skin of a woman,” praised The Evening Standard of her fourth novel, “August Is a Wicked Month,” the story of a divorced mother aflame with desire. She “gave voice to a previously muzzled generation of Irish women,” declared novelist Eimear McBride.

O’Brien’s Ireland is “a land of shame, a land of murder and a land of strange sacrificial women,” as she describes it in her short story “A Scandalous Woman.” She describes how paternal violence — sanctioned by the misogynistic power of the Catholic Church — is woven into the fabric of life. Violence against women is an ordinary, everyday occurrence, as is their propensity to be punished for their sins.

O’Brien — who courted scandal before she published her first book by absconding from her job as a trainee pharmacist to live with the older and previously married Gébler — was born in a village in Country Clare that she later described as “fervid, enclosed, catastrophic.” Religion “permeated every aspect of one’s life” and rural village living was claustrophobic.

Her own father’s drunken binges terrorized the family, while the deep intimacy she felt with her mother infused many of the maternal relationships found in her fiction.

While her early novels and stories dealt largely with the interior lives of young girls and women, in the late 1980s she turned her gaze outward, toward the broader issues of Irish history and politics. Male violence still loomed large, but it was no longer confined to the domestic sphere.

In “House of Splendid Isolation” (1994), an old woman is taken hostage by an Irish Republican Army gunman on the run. “Down by the River” (1997) was based on a legal case in which a teenage rape victim fought for the right to travel to England for an abortion. “In the Forest” (2002) was a fictionalized account of a notorious triple homicide.

Rather than becoming tentative in her old age, O’Brien plunged into ever darker waters. Inspired by Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb leader who was charged with war crimes, “The Little Red Chairs” (2015) sees a wanted war criminal, now masquerading as a faith healer, disrupting life in a small Irish village. In 2019, when O’Brien was 88, she published “Girl,” the story of a schoolgirl abducted by Boko Haram that was inspired by a mass kidnapping in 2014. To research it, she traveled to Nigeria.

Throughout her career, O’Brien demonstrated an impressive stylistic tractability. The second-person narration of “A Pagan Place” — a device that’s so often clumsy and affected in the wrong hands — is brilliantly attuned to the narrator’s lack of agency. And both “The House of Splendid Isolation” and “In the Forest” combine the dynamic forward momentum of thrillers with a boldly experimental fragmentation of multiple narrative voices and perspectives.

O’Brien’s infamy was inescapable — and not just that caused by her fiction. She was known for the wild parties she hosted for her celebrity friends in the 1960s (Paul McCartney sang bedtime lullabies to her sons; Richard Burton recited Shakespeare in her living room; she was seduced by Robert Mitchum; she took LSD with R.D. Laing). As she told me when I interviewed her in 2015, her reputation as Ireland’s literary Jezebel had grown a little tiresome over the years: “It’s irrelevant now, and it would be nice to have a little alteration in the dramatic narrative.”

I interviewed her in her house in London’s Knightsbridge. It was on a quiet street just behind Harrods; the upstairs rooms were stuffed with boxes of handwritten drafts. She asked me if I knew of anyone who might help her sort through it all, archiving the important bits. It couldn’t be an aspiring writer, she decreed, distressed at the prospect of being ambushed and cajoled into reading someone’s mediocre novel in progress.

I seriously considered offering my own services, so delightful had I found her — so warm, but bold when the moment demanded it. At one point, we discussed critics who’d diminished her subject matter as “the narrow world of the heart.”

She’d almost roared her response. “Well, the heart ain’t that narrow, and the heart keeps beating!”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.