Spellbinder : Authors: Is she an Irish charmer, an earthy intellectual or a fierce and personal teller of tales? Edna O’Brien is all of these things, an enigma who fascinates both readers and critics.

Men talk about Edna O’Brien as if they are spellbound. They call her the great Irish writer, the adventurer, the beauty, the theatrical redhead. They declare that they love her, despite the fact that they are already married.

And she talks about herself as if they all are blind.

“I live alone,” she begins, to cast doubt on rumors about her many loves. After one failed attempt, she never remarried, for a not very glamorous reason.

“No one’s asked me.”

If men find her sparkling, she can’t understand why. “I grew up in fear,” she whispers as if she were telling a secret. “I can’t drive a car or swim.”

And her genius as a writer isn’t genius at all. “I don’t think I have a high I.Q., but I have a pervasive intelligence. Everything interests me.” It took her three years to write her new novel, “Time and Tide.” And she will claim 20 rewrites of the one before it, “The High Road.”

No shame in that. It has only enhanced her reputation as a writer, which has grown even stronger this month with the critical reaction to “Time and Tide.” The consensus is that this book--one of about 20 she has published--reinforces her position as the reigning master Irish storyteller.

“Writing is my meat,” she says.

But fast as it feeds her, she burns it off. “I am ambitious to get the brain moving. I want to meet interesting people. I love debate and combat. I love talking.”

The earthy intellectual; it is an unusual blend and it inspires extravagant praise. Friends are infatuated, critics are in awe. But at the same time, they seem confused. O’Brien is compared to romance novelists as well as to James Joyce. People tell you how she quotes Irish poetry, Celtic proverbs and personal conversations with Samuel Beckett. Then they describe her as a bawdy Molly Bloom.

Finally, the inconsistencies are part of the fascination. There are 15 people locked inside Edna O’Brien, and all of them seem to fit.

She unmasked several faces when she gave a reading from her new book at Beyond Baroque in Venice earlier this month.

Among them was one that isn’t described as often as the others: O’Brien can be something of a scold.

“I don’t write about doom and gloom,” she corrected the person who introduced her to the audience. “My heroines are not victims. They are people who take risks.”

She’s been known to dress down other hosts as well, for setting her up in the wrong hotel, serving her drinking water she didn’t want and otherwise inconveniencing her.

“I am, I suppose, a very fierce person,” she explains in an interview before the reading. Her pale appearance and her voice soft as a cello play against the words.

When she turns that fierceness toward fiction, she draws visceral stories that read like devastating fact. And often the facts are from her own life.

Meet a girl from an Irish country town, and it could be O’Brien. She was born in County Clare, and many characters in her short stories come from similar places.

Follow another from convent school, where she planned to become a nun. After five years in a Galway convent school, she went on to study at Pharmaceutical College in Dublin.

In the ‘50s, O’Brien married novelist Ernest Gebler, and by 1960 they had moved to London with their sons, Sasha and Carlos. The marriage ended by the late ‘60s; she kept the boys. The exact dates are foggy, as are some other biographical facts--like her age. Her birth year has been reported as 1930, or 1932, or 1936.

“You don’t have to mention age, do you?” she asks, as if it were an afterthought. “No need to tell everything.”

Despite such reticence, she has laced the most urgent of personal details through novels, short stories, plays and screenplays. “The Country Girls,” her first novel, was published in 1960; “Virginia,” a play about Virginia Woolf, was staged in London in 1983; “Lantern Slides,” a collection of stories, won her The Times book prize for fiction in 1990.

Her movies haven’t had as much of an impact, although one, “X,Y, Zee” starred Elizabeth Taylor in 1972. Americans know her best for her short stories, frequently published in the New Yorker.

Whatever else goes on in O’Brien fiction, there is the steady battering of souls. Someone is always being rejected by her parents, betrayed by her lover, abandoned by her children. She relates to troubled lives.

“I had a very difficult childhood emotionally, “ she says. “It affects you.”

Her father was a farmer whom she has described as a gambler and drinker. Her mother, who once worked as a barmaid in Brooklyn, was superstitious and engulfing, O’Brien once explained in an interview with the Paris Review.

It wasn’t until she moved to London that she got the courage to write. When “The Country Girls” was published, the Irish government banned it. “They thought it was a smear on womanhood,” she says.

The story tells of girlfriends sharing a flat in Dublin and experimenting with love and life. O’Brien dedicated the book to her mother and later found the family copy buried under pillows in her parents’ house, the dedication page torn out.

County Clare has been slow in forgiving her for her transgressions.

Thirteen years after the book was published, writer and editor Tom Cahill talked to the O’Brien family neighbors about Edna, for “A Literary Guide to Ireland.”

They had one thing to say: “The poor mother.”

Her own experience as a parent has been more rewarding.

“I am a good mother.” This is one of few unqualified credits O’Brien gives herself during hours of conversation.

That isn’t to say she writes cheerily about it. In “Time and Tide” she explores the clinging and pushing away that keeps some mothers harnessed to their children. And she tells of the tragic loss of a child as convincingly as if she had lived it.

In this case she hasn’t, explains Jonathan Galassi, her editor at Farrar Straus & Giroux. “Death stands for the loss of children that all parents suffer. You create a child to lose it; Edna understands that.”

Anxious parenting, broken marriages, strained relations with mothers and fathers account for many confused women in O’Brien’s inventory.

To make matters worse, most of them are attracted to evasive, unreachable men. This doesn’t read like the formula for feminism.

Yet, “Edna writes so well about feminist women,” says Philip Kaufman, a friend of O’Brien who wrote and directed the movie, “Henry and June.”

O’Brien’s women do indeed walk out of bad relationships, initiate sexual escapades, explore new careers as older women, raise children alone, all with a passion that defies their timid nature.

“I write about the plight of women,” O’Brien concedes. “But my agenda is the heart and the soul. I could not be called 100% feminist. I think it is vivid, dangerous writing, not just on one track.”

Now, she says, she wants to move on in her writing, from love and loss to other matters. Which matters, she can’t honestly tell.

“Some writers know the end when they start. I’m interested in the journey.”