Life
1897-1974, b. 3 Dec., Limerick, fourth dg. of Thomas O’Brien and
Catherine [née Thornhill], a wealthy Catholic horse-dealer and
his wife, who died when she was six; spent twelve years thereafter at
the Limerick boarding school Laurel Hill Convent, following a continental
curriculum; entered UCD on a scholarship, 1916; grad. in English and French,
1919; worked for foreign section of Guardian Weekly in Manchester;
briefly taught in a London convent school; visited Washington as secretary
to Stephen O’Mara, her br.-in-law, and chairman of de Valera’s
Bonds Drive; became governess to a Spanish family nr. Bilboa; returned
to London and m. Gustaaf Renier, a Dutchman, divorcing shortly after;
began writing in early 1920s; wrote a successful play, Distinguished
Villa, which ran for three months in London, 1926; followed by another,
The Bridge (Arts Th. Club, London, 1927), before turning to novels;
issued Without My Cloak (1931), winner of Hawthornden and James
Tait Black prizes, a chronicle of three generations of the Considines,
an Irish bourgeois family residing in ‘Mellick’ and centred
on Denis, the sensitive son; issued The Ante-Room (1934), her own
favourite among the novels, an Ibsenite tale of emotional and religious
crisis in the Mulqueen family, and ending with a suicide; issued Mary
Lavelle (1936), a novel in which the title character travels to Spain
and through her relationship with Juanito, with whom she experiences sexual
love; also makes overt reference to lesbianism in the character of Conlan,
and hence banned by Irish censors; reviewed Samuel Beckett’s Murphy
(1938), with other novels and judged that ‘Murphy swept all before
him’ calling it ‘a book in a hundred thousand’; issued
The Land of Spices (1941), relating the inner life of Mére
Marie-Hélène, Reverend Mother who has entered an Irish convent
in France on discovering her father’s homosexuality - for which it
was banned in Ireland - and is led to a more sympathetic view of him,
recalling his love of the poets Herbert and Crashaw; also shows the development
of emergent nationalism through her feelings for the youngest boarding-student,
an Irish girl; enjoyed international success with That Lady (1946),
a novel concerning the story of Ana de Mendoza and Philip II, who immures
her on account of her affair with Antonio Perez; adapted for Broadway
with Katharine Cornell in lead, 1949, and later filmed with Olivia de
Havilland as Ana; refused entry to Spain for her treatment of Philip II
up to 1957, when the Irish ambassador intervened successfully; issued
Farewell to Spain (1937) and a life of Teresa of Avila (1952);
lived in England for 20 years on leaving Spain and later moved to Ireland,
living at Roundstone, Connemara, 1950, before selling her house there
in financial straights in 1961; settled in village cottage in Boughton
[nr. Canterbury], Kent, 1965; wrote Irish Times column, “Long Distance”;
re-visited America; d. in hospital at Faversham, Kent, d. 13 Aug., leaving uncompleted novel Constancy; her papers were donated by Austin Hall, a godson, to Univ. of Limerick, 2004. IF
DIB DIW DIL KUN FDA G20 OCIL
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Works
Plays, Distinguished Villa: Play in Three Acts (London:
Ernest Benn 1926); That Lady [stage vers.] (NY: Harper 1949). Novels,
Without My Cloak (London: Heinemann; NY: Garden City: Doubleday,
Doran 1931); The Ante-Room (London: Heinemann; NY: Garden City:
Doubleday, Doran 1934) [signed Limerick, 18th Jan. 1934]; Mary Lavelle
(London: Heinemann; NY: Garden City: Doubleday, Doran 1936); The Schoolroom
Window ([London: Heinemann; NY: Garden City: Doubleday, Doran] 1937);
Pray for a Wanderer (London: Heinemann; NY: Garden City: Doubleday,
Doran 1938); The Land of Spices (London: Heinemann 1941; Millington
1973); The Last of Summer (1943; rep. Virago 1990); That Lady
(London: Heinemann 1946; Harmondsworth: Penguin 1965), publ. in America
as For One Sweet Grape (Garden City: Doubleday 1946); The Flower
of May (London: Heinemann 1953); As Music and Splendour (NY:
Harper 1958); and travel books, Farewell, Spain (London: Heinemann;
NY: Garden City: Doubleday, Doran 1937), 299pp., English Diaries and
Journals (1943); Teresa of Avila (London: Max Parrish;
NY: Sheed & Ward 1951).
Memoirs, My Ireland (NY: Hastings House 1962), Presentation Parlour (London: Heinemann 1963). Miscellaneous, ‘George Eliot: A Moralist and a Fabulist’, in G. R. Hamilton, ed., Essays by Divers Hands [Trans. of the Royal Soc. of Literature: No. 27 (London: [RSL 1955) [cp.55]; ‘Imaginative Prose by the Irish, 1820-1970’, in Joseph Ronsley, ed., Myth and Reality in Irish Literature (Ontario 1977), pp.305-15.
Reprints, That Lady, intro. Des Hogan [Mod. Classics] (Virago 1996); The Ante-Room, with Afterword by Deirdre Madden [Modern Classics] (London: Virago 1996), 306pp. [Afterword, 17pp., signed Intermesoli, Italy, 1988]
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Vivian Mercier, ‘Kate O’Brien’, in Irish Writing, I, 1946, pp.86-100.
Interview article in New York Times, Dec. 4 1949), p.22
John Jordan, ‘Some Works of the Month, Kate O’Brien: A Note on Her Themes, Being a Consideration of The Flower of Amy’, in The Bell, XIX, 7 (Jan. 1954), pp.53-59.
—, ‘Kate O’Brien: First Lady of Irish Letters’, in Hibernia (11 May 1973), p.11.
—, ‘Kate O’Brien: A Passionate Talent’, in Hibernia (30 Aug. 1974), p,19.
Eavan Boland, ‘That Lady: A Profile of Kate O’Brien 1897-1974’, in The Critic, XXXIV, 2 (Winter 1975), pp.16-25.
John Jordan, ed., ‘Kate O’Brien Special Issue’, in John Liddy, ed., Stony Thursday Book, No. 7 (Limerick 1981), [q.pp.]
Barbara Di Bernard, ‘Kate O’Brien’, in Robert Hogan, ed., Dictionary of Irish Literature (Conn: Greenwood Publ.; Dublin: Gill & Macmillan 1979).
Eavan Boland, Preface [introduction] to The Ante-Room [1934] (Dublin: Arlen House Press 1980).
Lorna Reynolds, Preface to The Land of Spices [1941] (Dublin: Arlen House 1982).
Joan Ryan, ‘Women in the Novels of Kate O’Brien’, in Heinz Kosok, ed., Studies in Anglo-Irish Literature (Bonn: Bovier Verlag Herbert Grundmann 1982), pp.322-32.
Joan Ryan, ‘Class and Creed in Kate O’Brien’, in Maurice Harmon, ed., Irish Writer and Society (Colin Smythe 1984), pp.125-35.
Adele M. Dalsimer, ‘A Not So Simple Saga: Kate O’Brien’s Without My Cloak’, in Éire-Ireland, 21, 3 (Fall 1986), pp.55-71.
Lorna Reynolds, Kate O’Brien: A Literary Portrait (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe; NJ: Barnes & Noble 1987).
Lorna Reynolds, ‘The Image of Spain in the Novels of Kate O’Brien’, in Wolfgang Zach and Heinz Kosok, eds., Literary Interrelations: Ireland, England and the World, Vol. III: National Images and Stereotypes (Tübingen: Guntar Narr Verlag, 1987), pp.181-87.
Adele M. Dalsimer, Kate O’Brien: A Critical Study (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan 1990).
John Cronin, ‘Kate O’Brien, The Ante-Room’, in Irish Fiction, 1900-1940 [The Anglo-Irish Novel, Vol. II] (Belfast: Appletree Press 1990) [Chap. XII], pp.138-47.
Ann Owens Weekes, ‘Kate O’Brien: Family in the New Nation’, in Irish Women Writers: An Uncharted Tradition (Kentucky UP 1990), pp.108-32.
Rose Quiello, ‘“Disturbed Desires”: The Hysteric in Kate O’Brien’s Mary Lavelle’, in Éire-Ireland, 25, 3 (Fall 1990), pp.46-57.
Benedict Kiely, ‘Love, Pain and Parting: The Novels of Kate O’Brien’, in The Hollins Critic, 29, 2 (April 1992), pp.1-11, rep. in A Raid into Dark Corners and Other Essays (Cork UP 1999), pp. 55-65.
Éibhear Walshe, ed., Ordinary People Dancing: Essays on Kate O’Brien (Cork UP 1993), 256pp.
Anne Fogarty, ‘The Ear of the Other: Dissident Voices in Kate O’Brien’s As Music and Splendour and Marcy Dorcey’s A Noise from the Woodshed’, in Éibhear Walshe, ed., Sex, Nation and Dissent in Irish Writing (Cork UP 1997), pp.170-201.
Eileen Battersby, ‘What Kate Wrote: Dissecting the Bourgeois Mind’ (Irish Times, 15 Feb. 1997).
Declan Kiberd, ‘Kate O’Brien: The Ante-Room’, in Irish Classics (London: Granta 2000), pp.556-73.
Geraldine Meaney [UCD], ‘Regendering Modernism: The Woman Artist in Irish Women’s Fiction’, in Women: a Cultural Review 15, 1 (March 2004), pp. 67-82 [considered with Rosamund Jacob].
Eamon Maher, Cross-Currents and Confluences: Echoes of Religion in Twentieth-Century Fiction (Dublin: Veritas 2000).
John Hildebidle, Five Irish Writers: The Errand of Keeping Alive (Harvard UP 1989).
Anthony Roche, in Éibhear Walshe, ed., Ordinary People Dancing: Essays on Kate O’Brien (Cork UP 1993).
Declan Kiberd, in Irish Classics (London: Granta 2000).
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Notes
Seamus Deane, gen. ed., Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing
(Derry: Field Day 1991), Vol. 2, selects The Ante-Room; 1221, BIOG
describes Teresa of Avila as a proto-feminism portrait of a great
woman. Bibl. cites Augustine Martin, ed. The Genius of Irish Prose
(Cork [Mercier Press] 1985); Lorna Reynolds, Kate O’Brien: A Literary
Portrait (Gerrards Cross 1987); Adele M. Dalsimer, Kate O’Brien:
A Critical Study (Gill & Macmillan 1990).
Helena Sheehan, Irish Television Drama: A Society and Its Stories (RTE/Mercier 1987), lists TV film, The Ante-Room, adpt. Tony Hickey and dir. Sean Cotter (1981).
Libraries & Booksellers: Belfast Central Public Library (1956 Catalogue) holds Farewell Spain (1937), and Our Little Life (1931). Hyland Books (1995) lists Kate O’Brien, ‘Writers of Letters’, in Essays and Studies (1956), which also contains a contrib. from T. R. Henn (‘The Accent of Yeats’s Last Poems’).
Mary Lavelle (1936), a novel in which the title character
travels to Spain and through her relationship with Juanito, with whom
she experiences sexual love - and later emotional loss - comes to repudiate
the ‘violent and terrible Irish purity’ of her home embracing
instead the desire to ‘belong to no one place’ - a feminist
position to be compared with Virginia Woolf’s determination to belong
to ‘no country’ in A Room of One’s Own.
The Ante-Room (1934) Agnes Mulqueen is in love with Vincent, the husband of her vivacious sister Marie-Rose; her mother Teresa is dying of cancer while her father Danny potters about the house; Canon Considine, her maternal uncle, conducts a Triduum mass in the ante-room of the title; Dr. Curran finds himself proposing to Agnes and is rejected; Nurse Cunningham plans to become the wife of Reggie, Teresa’s weak and syphilitic son whose nurture she is determined to settle before she dies; Vincent, faced with Agnes’s resistance to the desire to place their love for each other before hers for her sister and her religious principles, commits suicide with a shotgun to resolve the crisis. The novel is set over days of All Souls’ Feast in the family home where her mother Teresa is dying of cancer. The novel includes a visit from London specialists to the household of this Irish haute-bourgeois family.
The Land of Spices (1941)is so-named after the concluding lines of George Herbert’s sonnet: ‘Exalted manna; gladnesse of the best, / heaven in ordinarie, man well drest, / The milkie way, the bird of Paradise / Church-bels beyond the starres heard; the soul’s / bloud. The land of spices, something understood.’ (Quoted in Benedict Kiely, ‘Love, Pain and Parting: the Novels of Kate O’Brien’, A Raid into Dark Corners and Other Essays, Cork UP 1999, pp.62, 62; Note that in quoting these in part, Kiely cites others by Herbert too: ‘The wrong is mixed. In tragic life, Got wot, / No villain need be! Passion spins the plot; / We are betrayed by what is false within.’)
James Joyce: Kate O’Brien reviewed Joyce’s [posthumous] first novel Stephen Hero (1944) in ‘Fiction’, The Spectator, 173 (4 Aug. 1944), p.112, remarking: ‘had he died leaving only Stephen Hero behind him, I wonder how many would have guessed exactly at the world’s loss? For read side by side with A Portrait of the Artist, it is crude and rough and arrogant and ugly’. [Q. source.]
Seán O Faoláin writes, ‘Kate O’Brien did much better in some ways. She dug into Limerick, or if one prefers saw through Limerick more deeply.’ (Letter to Jim Kemmy [1987], printed in Seán Dunne, ed., Cork Review [O Faoláin Special Issue] (Cork 1991), p.63.
Robert Fisk meditates on the former Yugoslavia in the light of Kate O’Brien’s Farewell Spain, in Graph 2. 1 (1995) [noticed in Irish Literary Supplement, Fall 1995, Brief Notes].
Moral fiction: In ‘George Eliot: Moralising Fabulist’ [q.d.], Kate O’Brien refers to The Mill on the Floss as having moved ‘the English novel miles ahead of itself’, propelling its ‘whole moral conception forward’, so tat as a form, the novel could become the instrument or ‘an active and unblinking conscience’. (Quoted in Adele Dalsimer, Kate O’Brien: A Critical Study, Dublin: Gill & Macmillan 1990, p.22; cited in Bridget Kearns, UUC, 2000.)
Tributes: Mary Coll, All Things Considered (Galway: Salmon Press 2003), contains a poem dedicated to Kate O’Brien (“Something understood”). Louise C. Callaghan, Find the Lady: A Life of Kate O’Brien was commissioned and produced by the Abbey Theatre, Dublin ([q.d.])
Banned writer: Kate O’Brien’s Farewell to Spain was banned in that country and the author forbidden to enter it until the Irish ambassador intervened.
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Princess Grace Irish Library (Monaco)