NEW YORK, NY.- 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 Saturday. She was 93.

Her death was announced on social media by her publisher, Faber, which said only that she had died “after a long illness.” She had spoken in recent years about being treated for cancer.

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.

When her writing was first published, she was considered a literary pioneer whose distinctive style gave voice to women whose passions had never been portrayed with such honesty.

“I learned from her,” American novelist Mary Gordon once said, “particularly her way of writing about the intensity and danger of childhood. She has described a kind of girl’s life that hadn’t been talked about before.”

But the boldness of her writing never endeared her to the women’s rights movement, which disliked her evocation of hard luck singles and desperate mistresses. O’Brien took the rejection in stride.

“I don’t feel strongly about the things they feel strongly about,” she once said, referring to women’s rights advocates. “I feel strongly about childhood, truth or lies, and the real expression of feeling.”

For decades, her work was more highly praised outside Ireland than in her homeland, which she left for good in the 1960s. With her auburn hair, green eyes and Irish country lilt, she was seen by non-Irish critics as the embodiment of Ireland itself. But in Ireland, her persona struck many as too rich to be real. (The Irish literary critic Denis Donoghue called her “stage Irish.”)

Her work eventually won over many critics. In 2001, she received the Irish PEN lifetime achievement award, and in 2018, the PEN/Nabokov award for achievement in international literature.

But the early criticism left lasting marks. “The Country Girls” had shamed her conservative Roman Catholic parents in rural western Ireland. The book’s honest descriptions of the girls’ sexual escapades appalled many, and with the approval of the Catholic Church hierarchy the book was banned in Ireland, as were several subsequent ones.

The book was dedicated to O’Brien’s mother, but “my parents were too ashamed to be proud” and they never recovered from the hurt, she said. After her mother died, O’Brien found a copy of “The Country Girls” that she had given her years before. The dedication page had been torn out, and offensive words had been blotted out with a pen.

But 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 O’Brien described as “a very frightening and arrestive place.”

Although she had three siblings, she was a solitary child who wandered through the woods near her home dreaming up stories and filling copybooks with her tales. In 1941, she entered the Convent of Mercy in Loughrea, County Galway, intending to become a nun. She stayed five years before going to Dublin, where she worked in a drugstore.

In Dublin, O’Brien read widely and began submitting short stories to newspaper competitions, encouraged by Czech-Irish novelist Ernest Gébler. Rebelling against the strictures of their rural community, they eloped in the early 1950s. The marriage did not last, and after their divorce, O’Brien took their two sons with her to London.

Gébler died in 1998. O’Brien’s survivors include her sons Sasha, an architect, and Carlo, a writer, along with several grandchildren.

O’Brien gained international recognition in 1960 with “The Country Girls,” which she wrote in a fury of inspiration that lasted 2 1/2 weeks. It was the story of two Catholic girls — the shy, sensitive Kate Brady and her rebellious friend Baba Brennan — and their sexual awakening in Dublin.

Expelled from the convent, Kate describes her first lover: “That moment was totally perfect for me; and everything that I had suffered up to then was comforted in the softness of his soft, lisping voice; whispering, whispering, like the snowflakes. He kissed me. It was a real kiss. It affected my entire body. My toes, though they were numb and pinched in the new shoes, responded to that kiss, and for a few minutes my soul was lost.”

O’Brien wrote other novels about Kate and Baba, and her reputation was established. The misfortunes of love were to be the central theme of her work, leading one critic to ask “why is her women’s luck so bad?” Her heroines were repeatedly jilted, betrayed and troubled by accidents and illnesses that were often interpreted as divine retribution for their waywardness.

Besides publishing more than two dozen novels over her long career, she also produced short stories, plays and several works of nonfiction, including a short biography of James Joyce published in 1999 and “Byron in Love” (2009), which examined the poet’s amorous exploits.

Francine Prose, writing in The New York Times Book Review in 2019, cited O’Brien’s ability to “inhabit the minds of her characters” even when writing about people and events “distant from her own experience.” She brought to life an IRA killer in “House of Splendid Isolation” and a serial murderer in “In the Forest” (2002), both set in Ireland.

In 2016 Little, Brown & Co. published her novel “The Little Red Chairs,” about a mysterious sex therapist who shows up in a village in rural western Ireland. After he enchants a local woman, his true identity as a Serbian war criminal is revealed.

“But O’Brien is not interested in sensationalizing her material,” Joyce Carol Oates wrote in the Times Book Review, “and ‘The Little Red Chairs’ is not a novel of suspense, still less a mystery or a thriller; it is something more challenging, a work of meditation and penance. How does one come to terms with one’s own complicity in evil, even if that complicity is ‘innocent’?"

In 2019, when she was 88, O’Brien ventured beyond Irish shores for her book “Girl,” a white-knuckle account of the teenage girls who were kidnapped and abused in 2014 by the Boko Haram extremist group in Nigeria.

O’Brien had traveled to Nigeria to research the book, speaking to victims about their ordeal and incorporating some of their raw details into her writing. “I was a girl once but not anymore,” reads the harrowing opening sentence. “I smell. Blood dried and crusted all over me and my wrapper in shreds. My insides, a morass.”

The book was widely praised, but O’Brien was criticized for taking on a subject so obviously foreign to her. She defended her decision to write about Boko Haram, rejecting accusations of cultural appropriation by insisting that the theme of “Girl” transcended the tragedy of the individual characters and reflected the same women’s struggles against poverty, violence and sexual exploitation that she had explored many times since publishing “The Country Girls.”

Such struggles, she believed, are both universal and eternal, no matter where their stories take place.

“I don’t know whether I will last or not,” she said in an 1989 interview with The New York Times Magazine. “All I know is that I want to write about something that has no fashion and that does not pander to any period or to a journalistic point of view. I want to write about something that would apply to any time because it’s a state of the soul.”

Despite her skirmishes with the church, she remained a faithful Catholic. But she said she preferred to confess her sins in foreign places, like Italy, where the priests barely understood English and granted absolution readily.

Even as she battled cancer, O’Brien continued to write daily, using pen and paper, usually in the early mornings, so that, as she once noted, she could, “go straight from my dreams to my work.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.