Irish Author, Journalist and Playwright
Born 1897 Died 1974
Katherine O'Brien was born at Boru House in Limerick on the
3rd December 1897, the sixth of nine children of Thomas O'Brien
and his wife Catherine, née Thornhill. Her father was a successful
horse breeder and the O'Briens were a wealthy Catholic
middle-class family, but her mother died from cancer in 1903, and
she was sent to board with the nuns at the Laurel Hill Convent in
Limerick when she was five years-old. She remained at the convent
until the death of her father in June 1916. With money now scarce,
her family wanted her to find a nice safe job in a bank, but Kate
won herself a scholarship to study at University College, Dublin,
where she read English and French.
After graduation she left Ireland to work for the
Manchester Guardian as a translator, and then moved to
London where she spent six months teaching at St Mary's Convent in
Hampstead. In 1922 she went to Spain as a governess to the Areilza
family in Bilbao, and afterwards returned to London where she
married a Dutch journalist, Gustaaf Johannes Renier, on the 17th
May 1923. The marriage failed within a year and she found work as a
journalist and reviewer for such periodicals as Time and
Tide and The Spectator.
In order to fulfill a bet she made with the actress Veronica
Turleigh, she wrote a play, Distinguished Villa, which
was produced in London in May 1926. The success of this play led to
further work as a journalist and reviewer and also led to her being
commissioned to write a novel by the publishers Heinemann,
although it was not until 1931 that her first novel Without my
Cloak finally appeared. Sometimes described as an Irish
Forsyte Saga, this novel told the story of a family of Catholic
shopkeepers living in a fictionalised version of Limerick, known as
Mellick over three generations and addressed the theme (as did most
of her subsequent novels) of the struggle for personal freedom
against the strictures of both Irish middle class society and the
Roman Catholic Church. It won both the James Tait Black Memorial
Prize and the Hawthornden Prize and inspired a sequel, The
Ante-Room (1934).
Both these novels were far more popular in Britain than they
were in Ireland, where many disapproved of her critical attitude
towards Irish society. In 1936 her novel Mary Lavelle,
whose protagonist was a young Irish woman working abroad in Spain
as a governess, attracted the attention of the Irish Censorship
Board who banned the book for its references to extra-martial sex.
A similar fate befell the Land of Spices, the story of
another young Irish woman and her experiences living in convent
between the years 1904 and 1914, which was again banned in Ireland
thanks to one sentence that alluded to the existence of
homosexuality. Kate also found herself in trouble with the Spanish
government thanks to the criticisms of General Franco contained
in her 1937 work Farewell Spain, and she was barred from
entering Spain for the next twenty years as a result.
Her greatest commercial success was her 1946 work That
Lady, an historical novel set in sixteenth-century Spain,
which she later adapted into a play which was produced with some
success on Boradway in 1949 with Katherine Cornell playing the
title role and was later made into a film in 1955 starring Olivia
De Havilland.
Kate felt able to return to Ireland in 1950 and lived first in
Dublin, before she settled at Roundstone in Connemara, where she
wrote a biography of Saint Theresa of Avila, together with two
further novels The Flower of May (1953) and As
Music and Splendour (1958), neither of which was particularly
succesful. She returned to Britain in 1960 and lived at Boughton
in Kent, where she wrote one further novel and a personal account
of her homeland My Ireland (1962)
She died at the Kent and Canterbury Hospital on the 13th August
1974. She received the last rites despite not having been a
practising Catholic for many years and was buried at the public
cemetery near to the church of Our Lady of Mount Carmel in
Faversham. Since her death a Kate O'Brien Committee has been formed
in her home town of Limerick which has organised the Kate O'Brien
weekend since 1984.
Bibliography
Plays
Novels
Non-Fiction
REFERENCES
Gifford Lewis, ‘O'Brien, Katherine (1897–1974)’, Oxford Dictionary
of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004REFERENCES
Biographies at
http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/o/kate-obrien/
http://www.irelandseye.com/aarticles/history/people/writers/kobrien
.shtm
Author profiles at
http://www.penguin.co.uk/nf/Author/AuthorPage/0,,1000023868,00.html
http://www.virago.co.uk/meet/obrien_profile.asp?TAG=&CID=virago