Kate O'Brien (3 December 1897 - 13 August 1974), was an Irish novelist and playwright. 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 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 dealt with issues of female sexuality — with several exploring 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 the town of Canterbury in 1974, and 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.
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Biography
She 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.
Bibliography
- Distinguished Villa: A Play in Three Acts (1926)
- Without My Cloak (1931)
- The Ante-Room (1934)
- Mary Lavelle (1936) (made into a movie, Talk of Angels, in 1998)
- Farewell Spain (1937)
- Pray for the Wanderer (1938)
- The Land of Spices (1941)
- The Last of Summer (1943)
- That Lady (1946) (Later a Broadway show [1949] and a movie [1955])
- Theresa of Avila (1951)
- The Flower of May (1953)
- As Music and Splendour (1958)
- My Ireland (1962)
- Presentation Parlour (1963)
See also
- Limerick
- Irish literature
- Censorship in the Republic of Ireland
- Feminist history in the United Kingdom
- List of people on stamps of Ireland
