1853. Miss E. S. Sheppard, Ch. Auchester, II. 206. But of his restless and radiant eyes I could not bear the stressful brightness, it dimmed my sight.
1886. Miss Linskill, Haven under Hill, I. ii. 28. The stressful days of labour and care.
Hence Stressfully adv.
1890. Harper’s Mag., April, 809/1. It [Louise Chandler Moulton’s poetry] is often too stressfully subjective.
1902. Q. Rev., April, 367. Flaubert … preached, and laboured stressfully to put into practice, his conviction that great art is ‘scientific and impersonal.’
