Kate O'Brien

For the character from The Drew Carey Show, see The Drew Carey Show#Cast and characters.

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

Biography

Kathleen "Kate" Mary Louie O'Brien was born in Limerick City at the end of the 19th century. Following the death of her mother when she was five, she became a boarder at Laurel Hill convent. She graduated from the newly established University College, Dublin and then went to work at the Manchester Guardian. After the success of her play Distinguished Villa in 1926, she took to full-time writing and was awarded the 1931 James Tait Black Prize for her debut novel Without My Cloak. She 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 sexuality — several of them explore gay/lesbian themes — and both Mary Lavelle and The Land of Spices were banned in Ireland. She also wrote travel books, or rather accounts of places and experiences, on both Ireland and Spain, a country she loved, and which features in a number of her novels. She lived much of her later life in England and died in Canterbury in 1974; she is buried in Faversham Cemetery.

The Glucksman Library at the University of Limerick currently holds a large collection of O'Brien's personal writings [1]. In August 2005, Penguin reissued her final novel, As Music and Splendour (1958), which had been out of print for decades. The Kate O'Brien Weekend, which takes place in Limerick, attracts a large number of people, both academic and non-academic.

In the film, Brief Encounter (1945), Celia Johnson speaks about collecting "the latest Kate O'Brien."

Novels

• Without My Cloak (1931) - (Winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize))
• The Ante-Room (1934)
• Mary Lavelle (1936) (adapted as the 1998 film Talk of Angels)
• Pray for the Wanderer (1938)
• The Land of Spices (1941)
• The Last of Summer (1943)
• That Lady (1946) (later a 1949 Broadway show and a 1955 movie)
• The Flower of May (1953)
• As Music and Splendour (1958)

Other Works

• Distinguished Villa: A Play in Three Acts (1926)
• Farewell Spain (1937)
• Teresa of Avila (1951)
• My Ireland (1962)
• Presentation Parlour (1963)

Critical Studies of O'Brien

• Lorna Reynolds: Kate O'Brien: A Literary Portrait (1987)
• Adele M. Dalsimer: Kate O'Brien: A Critical Study (1990)
• Éibhear Walshe (editor): Ordinary People Dancing: Essays on Kate O'Brien (1993)
• Éibhear Walshe: Kate O'Brien: A Writing Life (2006)

Critical Essays on O'Brien

• Joan Ryan: "Class and Creed in the Novels of Kate O'Brien" in M. Harmon (editor): The Irish Writer and the City (1984)
• Lorna Reynolds: "The Image of Spain in the Novels of Kate O'Brien" in W. Zack and H Kosok (editors): National Images and Stereotypes (1988)
• 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)
• Eamon Maher: "Love and the Loss of Faith in the Novels of Kate O'Brien" in Crosscurrents and Confluences (2000)
• Angela Ryan:"'A Franco-Irish Solution?' Francois Mauriac, Kate O' Brien and the Catholic Intellectual Novel". in France and Ireland: Anatomy of a Relationship. Ed E. Maher and G. Neville. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2004: 97-109.

Film Adaptations

• That Lady (1955) starring Olivia de Havilland, Gilbert Roland, and Paul Scofield
• Last of Summer (TV, 1977)
• Talk of Angels (1998) starring Polly Walker, Vincent Perez, Franco Nero, Frances McDormand, Ruth McCabe and Penelope Cruz

See also

• Limerick
• Irish literature
• Censorship in the Republic of Ireland
• Feminist history in the United Kingdom
• List of people on stamps of Ireland

Further reading

• Irish Writers on Writing featuring Kate O'Brien. Edited by Eavan Boland (Trinity University Press, 2007).

External links

• Litencyc
• Biography
• Kate O'Brien Weekend
• Portraits of Kate O'Brien in the National Portrait Gallery (London).
• 'Kate O'Brien' file at Limerick City Library, Ireland