Kate O'Brien (novelist)


Kate O'Brien was an Irish novelist 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.
In 1922–23, she worked as a governess in the Basque Country, in the north of Spain, where she began to write fiction. Upon her return to England, O'Brien worked at the Manchester Guardian. 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. Kate O'Brien is best known for her 1934 novel The Ante-Room, her 1941 novel The Land of Spices, and the 1946 novel That Lady.
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. 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.
Even though Kate O'Brien lived outside of Ireland for most of her adult life, she remained close to her family and to her roots in Limerick. Many of her novels are set in Ireland in 'Mellick' which is her fictional name for Limerick. She returned regularly for holidays to her family and lived in Roundstone in Connemara for a period in the 1960s. She wrote a regular newspaper column for the Irish Times entitled From a Distance which captured the ambivalent relationship she had with Ireland. She was keenly interested in, and aware of, political and cultural developments in Ireland and brought an outsider's perspective to them. Her relationship with Ireland was troubled by the banning of her two novels but this did not deter her from continuing to critique in her novels and in her other writings what she considered to be the shortcomings of the new Irish State, particularly during the De Valera years.
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. She also wrote an Irish travelogue My Ireland which she dedicated to "To Limerick - my dear native place." She said that it was in Limerick that she "began to view the world and to develop the necessary passion with which to judge it, I know that wherever I am it is still from Limerick that I look out and make my surmises."
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 diversity — several of her books include positive gay/lesbian characters —, make her a pioneer in queer literary representation. Even though O'Brien did not identify as a lesbian, or explicitly acknowledge her lesbianism, she led her life openly and freely enjoyed relationships with a number of women throughout her life. She was very critical of conservatism in Ireland, and the banning of her books highlighted the absurdity of the Irish censorship laws. Following a campaign around the banning of The Land of Spices led by Seán Ó Faoláin and others, the censorship laws were reformed in 1946. The Land of Spices which had been banned in 1941 was 'unbanned' in 1949 - 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. She lived much of her life in England and died in Faversham, near Canterbury, in 1974.

Legacy

The Glucksman Library at the University of Limerick holds an important collection of O'Brien's writings.
In August 2005, Penguin reissued her final novel, As Music and Splendour, which had been out of print for decades.
The Limerick Literary Festival in honour of Kate O’Brien, takes place in Limerick every year, attracting academic and non-academic audiences.
In the classic film Brief Encounter, the co-protagonist Laura says she has reserved "the new Kate O'Brien" at her local Boots library, 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