Kate O’Brien – Mary Lavelle

and Writing a New Ireland

ISSK 1100 Writing Ireland 1: An Introduction to Twentieth-Century Irish Writing

Dr Nessa Cronin, Centre for Irish Studies, NUI Galway.
 Kate O’Brien (1897-1974)
 Born in Limerick.
 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
 1922–23, she worked as a governess in the Basque Country, in the north of Spain, where she began to write fiction
 1920s – writer for The Manchester Guardian
 1931 - awarded both the  James Tait Black Prize and the Hawthornden Prize for her debut novel Without My Cloak.
 Best known for The Ante-Room (1934) and The Land of Spices (1941)
 Key themes – female agency , independence and sexuality
 Mary Lavelle – connection between Ireland and Spain 1920s Europe
 Censorship of her novels – due to contested themes
 1960s on – wrote ‘Long Distance’ column for The Irish Times https://
www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/kate-o-brien-s-irish-times-columns-from-50-years-ago-are-still-so-relevant-1.4150014
 Also author of plays, film scripts, short stories, essays, copious journalism, two biographical studies, and two personal travelogues
 She lived much of her life in England and died in Faversham, near Canterbury, in 1974.
 New Beginnings….

 “[the] freest spirit must have some birthplace, some locus standi from which to view the world and
some innate passion by which to judge it. Modestly I say the same for my relationship with Limerick. It
was there that I began to view the world and to develop the same passion by which to judge it. It is there
indeed that I learnt the world, and I know that wherever I am, it is still from Limerick that I make my
surmises.” (My Ireland, 148)
 Adventure to Spain/Escape from Ireland – “To go to Spain. To be alone for a little space, a tiny hiatus
between her life's two accepted phases. To cease being a daughter without immediately becoming a
wife. To be a free lance, to belong to no one place or family or person . . . Spain!” (Mary Lavelle,)
 La corrida - “more vivid with beauty and all of beauty's anguish, more full of news of life's possible
pain and senselessness and quixotry and barbarism and glory than anything else ever before
encountered by this girl . . . a more personal and searching arrow to the heart than she had ever dreamed
of.” (Mary Lavelle, pp. 91-92)
Related texts and further reading:
 Farewell Spain (political travelogue, 1937)* Dublin and Cork (photographic book with text by
O'Brien, 1961)
 My Ireland (travelogue, 1962)
 Critical Scholarship:
 Eibhear  Walshe. Kate O'Brien: A Writing Life (Cork UP, 2006)
 Emma Donoghue. "Embraces of Love". in Faithful Companions: Collected Essays Celebrating the
25th Anniversary of The Kate O'Brien Weekend. Mary Coll ed. Limerick: Mellick Press, 2009,
pp. 16–31.
 Sharon Tighe-Mooney. “Sexuality and Religion in Kate O’Brien’s Novels”. Essays in Irish Literary
Criticism: Gender, Sexuality, and Corporeality. Deirdre Quinn and Sharon Tighe-Mooney eds.
Lewinston, Queenston, and Lampeter: Edwin Mellen, 2008, pp. 125–140.
 Anne C. Fogarty: "The Ear of the Other: Dissident Voices in Kate O'Brien's As Music and
Splendor and Mary Dorcey's A Noise From the Woodshed" in Éibhear Walshe (editor): Sex, Nation
and Dissent in Irish Writing (1997)
 Gerardine Meaney. “Territory and Transgression – History, Nationality and Sexuality in Kate
O’Brien’s Fiction.” Irish Journal of Feminist Studies. Col. 2, issue 2 (December 1997): 77–92.