Katherine Mary Flannigan

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Katherine Mary Flannigan (born Katherine Mary O'Fallon, c. 1890, Ireland died 1954) immigrated with her family to Boston, Massachusetts as a small child. At age 16, she travelled to Calgary, Alberta to visit family and recover from an illness. In 1907, she met and married Mike Flannigan, a sergeant with the Northwest Mounted Police, and moved with him to isolated posts in the mountain and lake regions (Lesser Slave Lake) of British Columbia and northern Alberta. Her true story was the basis for the novel Mrs. Mike and the 1949 film of the same title.

After Sgt. Flannigan's death in 1933, Mrs. Flannigan left the North for a time and eventually related her story to Benedict and Nancy Freedman. Their novel drawn from her experiences, Mrs. Mike, was published in 1947 and became a critical and popular success.

Mrs. Flannigan then wrote The Faith of Mrs. Kelleen, which was set in 1880s Ireland and based on the story of her great-aunt. The January 1951 New York Times review by Orville Prescott stated, "Having lived a life of dramatic adventure (her honeymoon was a 700-mile jaunt by dog team in the Canadian north) and having seen others write a popular novel about it, Mrs. Flannigan has evidently decided that any other books about her relations might as well be written by herself."

Press sources report that in her later years, Mrs. Flannigan remarried (John P. Knox) and lived in Vancouver. She died on Aug. 8, 1954, while visiting family and friends in Calgary.

[edit] Bibliography

  • Flannigan, Katherine Mary. The Faith of Mrs. Kelleen. New York: Coward-McCann, 1951.

[edit] Sources


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