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Kate O'Brien (3 December 1897 – 13 August 1974) was an Irish novelist and playwright.

For the cyclist, see Kate O'Brien (cyclist). For the character from The Drew Carey Show, see Kate O'Brien (The Drew Carey Show).
Not to be confused with Katie O'Brien, Kathleen O'Brien, Katherine O'Brien, or Cathy O'Brien.

Kate O'Brien
O’Brien in 1926
BornKathleen Mary Louise O'Brien
(1897-12-03)3 December 1897
Limerick City, Ireland
Died13 August 1974(1974-08-13) (aged 76)
Canterbury, England, UK
OccupationNovelist and playwright

Biography


Kathleen Mary Louise "Kate" O'Brien was born in Limerick City in 1897 to a middle-class family. Following the death of her mother when she was five, she joined her three older sisters as a boarder at Laurel Hill Convent becoming the youngest pupil at the school. She graduated in 1919 in English and French from the newly established University College, Dublin, and she then moved to London, where she worked as a teacher for a year.[1]

In 1922–23, she worked as a governess in Bilbao, Basque Country, in the north of Spain, where she began to write fiction.[2] Upon her return to England, O'Brien worked at the Manchester Guardian.[3] She married Dutch journalist Gustaff Reiner in 1922 but the marriage ended within a year. After the success of her play Distinguished Villa in 1926, she took to full-time writing and was awarded both the 1931 James Tait Black Prize and the Hawthornden Prize for her debut novel Without My Cloak.[citation needed]

Many of her books deal with issues of female agency and sexuality in ways that were new and radical at the time. Her 1936 novel, Mary Lavelle, was banned in Ireland and Spain, while The Land of Spices was banned in Ireland upon publication.[4] In addition to novels, she wrote plays, film scripts, short stories, essays, copious journalism, two biographical studies, and two very personal travelogues. Throughout her life, O'Brien felt a particular affinity with Spain—while her experiences in the Basque Country inspired Mary Lavelle, she also wrote a life of the Spanish mystic Teresa of Avila, and she used the relationship between the Spanish king Philip II and Maria de Mendoza to write the anti-fascist novel That Lady.[5]

Even though Kate O'Brien lived outside of Ireland for most of her adult life, the country played a crucial role in her creative output. Many of her novels are set in Ireland, in 'Mellick' which is her fictional name for Limerick. She lived in Roundstone in Connemara for a period in the 1950s. She wrote a regular newspaper column for the Irish Times entitled From a Distance which captured the ambivalent relationship she had with Ireland. In her novels after 1936, she is outspokenly critical of the conservatism of the new Irish State, particularly during the De Valera years. Her work promoted European identity, which she saw as being rooted in the Christian tradition—despite the fact that she was herself agnostic.

O'Brien wrote a political travelogue, Farewell Spain, to gather support for the leftist cause in the Spanish Civil War, and it has been argued that she was close to anarchism in the 1930s.[2] She also wrote a travelogue My Ireland (1962), where she offers a lively and engaging record of the places in Ireland that she loved (such as Connemara) or did not impress her (such as Dublin).

A feminist, her novels promoted gender equality and were mostly protagonised by young women yearning for independence. Kate O'Brien's determination to encourage a greater understanding of sexual difference — several of her books include positive gay/lesbian characters —, make her a pioneer in queer literary representation.[6] O'Brien was herself lesbian, and had a number of relationships with women, including the novelist E.M. Delafield, and the artist Mary O'Neill, who has been described as her 'life partner'.[7] She was very critical of conservatism in Ireland, and the banning of her books highlighted the absurdity of the Irish censorship laws. Following a debate on the banning of The Land of Spices in the Irish senate, and a campaign supported by Seán Ó Faoláin and others, the censorship laws were somewhat reformed in 1946 by creating an Appeals Board. The Land of Spices which had been banned in 1941 was 'unbanned' in 1949, but Mary Lavelle was never officially 'unbanned'. In this way, O'Brien helped bring to an end the cultural restrictions of the 1930s and 40s in the country.[8] She lived much of her life in England and died in Faversham, near Canterbury, in 1974.[citation needed] At the time of her death, she was poor and most of her books were out of print. In the 1980s, her work was recovered by feminist scholars and reprinted by feminist publishers such as Arlen House in Dublin and Virago in London. She is now considered to be a major twentieth century Irish writer.


Legacy


The Glucksman Library at the University of Limerick holds an important collection of O'Brien's writings.[citation needed]

In August 2005, Penguin reissued her final novel, As Music and Splendour (1958), which had been out of print for decades.

The Limerick Literary Festival in honour of Kate O’Brien (formerly the Kate O'Brien Weekend), takes place in Limerick every year, attracting academic and non-academic audiences.[9]

In the classic film Brief Encounter (1945), the co-protagonist Laura (Celia Johnson) says she has reserved "the new Kate O'Brien" at her local Boots library,[10] which prepares the audience for the moral dilemmas that the character is about to face. This offers a good example of how popular Kate O'Brien was in the 1940s, before falling into obscurity for decades, only to be 'rediscovered' as a key writer in the 1980s.


Fiction



Plays



Film scripts



Life writing



Travel writing



Journalism



Critical studies on O'Brien



Critical essays on O'Brien



Film adaptations



See also



Further reading



References


  1. E. Walshe, Kate O'Brien: A Writing Life (Cork UP, 2006)
  2. A.L. Mentxaka, Kate O'Brien and the Fiction of Identity (McFarland, 2011)
  3. E. Walshe. Kate O'Brien: A Writing Life (Cork UP, 2006)
  4. "What a shocker: no more books to ban". The Irish Times. Retrieved 4 August 2021.
  5. "St Teresa would back Madrid". Review by H S Skeffington of Farewell to Spain. Irish Democrat. 16 October 1937. Retrieved 26 September 2015.
  6. E. Donoghue. "'Out of Order': Kate O'Brien's Lesbian Fictions". in Ordinary People Dancing: Essays on Kate O'Brien. Eibhear Walshe ed. Cork: Cork University Press, 1993, pp. 36–59.
  7. Eibhear Walshe, Kate O'Brien: A Writing Life. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2006
  8. Fischerova, Jana. “The Writer and the Censor: Czechoslovakia and Ireland; the case of Kate O’Brien and Frank O’Connor.” Unpublished paper. CAIS conference, Maynooth, 24 June 2005.
  9. "Limerick Literary Festival in honour of Kate O'Brien". Archived from the original on 27 September 2015. Retrieved 26 September 2015.
  10. Dugan, page 170; Snoek-Brown, Jennifer, 'A brief encounter with a librarian', Reel Librarians (2011)


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