Kate O'Brien (novelist)

Kate O'Brien
Born Kathleen Mary Louise O'Brien
(1897-12-03)3 December 1897
Limerick City, Ireland
Died 13 August 1974(1974-08-13) (aged 76)
Canterbury, England, UK
Occupation Novelist and playwright

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

Biography

Kathleen Mary Louise "Kate" O'Brien was born in Limerick City in 1897. Following the death of her mother when she was five, she became a boarder at Laurel Hill Convent. She graduated 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 the Basque Country, in the north of Spain, where she began to write fiction.[2] Upon her return to England, Kate O'Brien worked at the Manchester Guardian.[3] 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.[4]

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.[5] 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.[6]

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] 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.[7] She was very critical of conservatism in Ireland, and by spearheading a challenge to the Irish Censorship Act, she 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.[4]

Legacy

The Glucksman Library at the University of Limerick holds an important collection of O'Brien's writings.[4]

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 Celia Johnson says she has reserved "the latest Kate O'Brien" at her local 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.

In the 1930s one of the notorious members of Ferguson's Gang adopted the pseudonym 'Kate O'Brien the Nark' in tribute to Kate.[10]

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. 1 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. 1 2 3 Legge, Charles (25 August 2008). "Answers To Correspondents". The Daily Mail. London.
  5. ↑ http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/weekend/2010/1218/1224285785943.html
  6. ↑ "St Teresa would back Madrid". Review by H S Skeffington of Farewell to Spain. Irish Democrat. 16 October 1937. Retrieved 26 September 2015.
  7. ↑ 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.
  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". Retrieved 26 September 2015.
  10. ↑ Hutton-North, Anna (2013). Ferguson's Gang – The Maidens behind the Masks. Lulu Inc. ISBN 978-1-291-48453-3.
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