Free Country Girl: A Memoir by Edna O’Brien Page A

to? Throwing out her poor, hot hands, she reveals all and begs his forgiveness. After much deliberation, Mr. Carlyle raises his noble form, pushes her hair from her brow, wipes the death dew from her forehead, and “suffered his lips to rest upon hers.”
    That same death dew and foolish intoxication I would find again in the pages of Tolstoy, as Anna Karenina, with her black gown, her rounded arms, her bracelets, her string of pearls, her unruly curls, her veiled eyes, also succumbed to the diabolical and enchanting lures of illicit love. But whereas Anna’s story stayed with me all my life, poor Isabel’s faded. The pent-up scenarios, the cheap thrills, and the manipulation of emotions palled. Anna, at the railway station, about to throw herself under a train, both to punish Vronsky and to escape the malice of others, gets down close to the tracks, looks at the bolts, the chains, the tall iron wheels of the first carriage that is moving up, in order to measure the point midway between the front and back wheels of the second carriage, so as to gauge her exact moment to jump. Poor Isabel, by comparison, is whisked off in a chaise and four in full operatic moonlight.
    Nevertheless, some of the cloying tendencies of Mrs. Henry Wood stayed with me on my first foray into fiction, aged about eight. It was written on a jotter, and called
Gypsy.
Isolde, the young heroine, dreamed of escape, incarcerated as she was, and often beaten by a cruel and intemperate father, and without theharmonious influence of a mother, who had been killed off. Her charmer arrives in the person of a Gypsy with a gold earring and red bandanna, who recklessly scours the countryside in a caravan and on horseback. Sighting her one day in the fields, he is struck by her beauty, her ringlets, her pensive expression, and her youth. It needs only dusk, when she is driving cattle in to be milked, for him to abduct her, sit her sidesaddle on his steed, a winding sheet over her head and face, and whisk her to his bastion in the remote mountains. Arriving, she meets a world of strangers, women with flashing but unloving eyes who take her aside and give her a new name, a Romany name, so that she is no longer the Isolde she was. Then she is dressed, groomed, and prepared for her nuptial night, in which I did not rule out the possibility of fatality. By midnight horses are heard. A posse of men have arrived on horseback, led by her father, a volley of gunfire is let off as the two sides engage in battle. Fortunately, I did not have to describe the battle, as the palpitating heroine, from whose point of view the story was told, is bundled into the back of the caravan and hidden under a heavy roll of carpet. All I needed to say was that they fought with the fierceness of Apaches (whatever that meant), that she was rescued by her own, and returned home to her old life of drudgery and submission.
    I put my story in a green trunk, where my mother kept oats for her hens, and either it was eventually thrown out or mice nibbled the paper to bits.
    After these fictions came the lure of drama. Twice a year traveling players came to the town, and in the town hall, on a stage lit with a few paraffin lamps, we were treated to the vagaries of
East Lynne, Murder in the Old Red Barn,
and
Dracula.
The sight of a very large safety pin being drawn across the tender throat of the young heroine in
Dracula
was too terrible to behold, and also riveting. As living theater it was matchless.Girls and women cried or choked back their tears, while men pretended to make fun of it, and yet, walking home under the stars, we could talk of nothing else.
    The actor who played Dracula was in digs with his wife, in a room above a public house. I decided that I would ask if I could join their company. The domestic situation was depressing. There was one child in a pram, which Dracula wheeled back and forth across the floor, while his wife, with a young baby under her arm, was stirring a saucepan of