Many went to England or to America, but many middle class
girls chose Spain. This was because it
was seen as a safely Catholic country, where an Irish girl could work, earn a
living and not be subjected to the pagan influences of England or the US. Their families and religious advisers could
recommend a safe job in Spain. Working
for well to do families gave them hopes of finding a husband, but this did not
often happen. There was an English queen on the Spanish throne at the time, and
an English community living in the country, who had their own social life, but
Irish governesses were not usually invited to their events. And Spanish aristocratic families saw the
governess as very little higher in social position than their servants. So the governesses and chaperones and English
teachers were a lonely set of women, who had dull and restricted social
lives. They often lived their whole
lives in Spain because they had no hope of returning home but who became bitter
about their limited life they had to lead.
Maura Laverty, like Kate O’Brien, was intelligent and
literate and adventurous. She did not
stay long as a governess but instead became a secretary to the Princess Bibesco
and worked in journalism. She found a
fiancé, a Hungarian, but then realised that she wanted to marry James Laverty,
an Irishman who had been her pen friend during her years in Spain. So she went
back to Ireland and they married. She
had children and went on writing, to support her family, as her husband was not
a steady provider. She worked as a
journalist, as a script writer for the TV series, Tolka Row, and as an “Agony
Aunt”. She did not write as many novels
as Kate O’Brien but two of her books “Never No More” (about her childhood) and
“No More than Human” were well known and loved. She also wrote children’s fiction and about
cookery.
“No More than Human” is a favourite book of mine. Like Kate O’Brien’s Mary Lavelle, it is set
in Spain and based on Maura Laverty’s experiences as a governess and her
attempts to get out of that life and into a more interesting job… and her
romances along the way. While the
Spanish were Catholics, the upper classes took a more elastic attitude to sex
than the puritanical Irish Catholics of that time, and both O’Brien’s Mary
Lavelle and Laverty’s Delia Scully learned more about the wilder side of life
and love than they might have done in Ireland.
Mary Lavelle falls in love with and sleeps with her employer’s married
son. Delia falls in love with a young
man whom she thinks wants to marry her, but who only wants to set her up as his
mistress, while he marries another girl for her money. I believe that, in the social climate of
Ireland at that time, it was only by setting the novels abroad, that writers
could get away with writing about adultery and illicit sex (let alone
homosexual love). Even then, Laverty, like Kate O’Brien and other writers, was
often “banned” in her native country.
I wish that Laverty had written more fiction, as she was a
talented and intelligent writer and if Delia Scully is a self-portrait, she was
also a charming and likable woman. She
died in her 50s, in 1966. Some of her
books were reprinted in the 1980s, by Virago Press. Others can be found on Amazon, in old editions.