Kate O’Brien An Irish writer

Apart from Joyce, Ireland has not produced that many novelists in bygone days.  It is a land of writers, but usually they wrote poetry or plays or at best short stories.  Kate O’Brien, who came from a middle class family in Limerick, was born in 1897, and she is one of the best known women writers of her time.  Its said that the novel is a middle class form of writing, usually giving a semi realistic picture of society and romance.. and so it isn't that popular in a society that lacks a middle class.  Ireland until the later 19th century, didnt have a very strong or populous middle class.... the country was divided between a large and impoverished rural working class and an upper class who were Protestant and of English origin and so not close to the peasantry.  In the later 19th century however, the farming classes began to buy out their farms, and the Catholic middle class of professionals and business people began to expand.  (Kate's father had risen form poverty to running a successful horse trading business).

Kate moved to England as a young woman and started a career in journalism and writing.  Her novels were usually about young Irish women, trying to find a role in the world.  They were usually love stories and many of them turned on some kind of illicit love.
Kate O’Brien was brought up Roman Catholic but as a young woman, although she retained an interest in the faith, she lost her religious beliefs and became agnostic, but one who had sympathy with Catholicism.  She married, in England, but her marriage was not a success and ended in divorce.  Afterwards Kate began to engage in relationships with women.   
So in some ways, her novels may have used illicit affairs as a coded way of dealing with her own socially unacceptable sexual feelings. 
   Most of them were banned in Ireland, because of their shocking subject matter and while she lived in Ireland at times, she spent much of her life in England and died there at the age of 76.
In “Mary Lavelle”, her novel about Spain, she writes of a love affair between Mary, a young Irish woman and a young Spanish man who is married.  Like many girls of her time, Mary went to Spain to work as a governess/chaperone to the girls of a Spanish aristocratic family.   It was common for girls to do this as a job for a few years, and some of them stayed and worked as duennas for a lifetime. Some found husbands.   Mary is engaged to an Irish man, but finds love and sexual awakening with Juan, the son of her employer, but he is married and cannot wed her.  But her feelings for him, help her to mature.
In another novel, The Ante Room, Agnes Mulqueen, a young Victorian Irish woman, falls in love with her sister’s husband and they admit their feelings to each other, but the affair is not consummated.

O’Brien also began to write, with increasing openness, as time went on, about homosexual love.  In “Land of Spices”, one of her best works, she writes of a woman who becomes a nun, when she finds that her father is a homosexual.  Later, the nun, Helen Archer, takes on a role of helping one of her young pupils, Anna, who wants to go to college but whose family don’t want to help a daughter to gain an education.   

Helen Archer has a feminist role in assisting her young protégée.  Kate O’Brien was a feminist writer and critical of the conservative and puritanical Ireland of De Valera.  Most of her books involve friendship and supportive relationships between women.   Mary Lavelle gives a picture of the “misses”, Irish women who work as governesses, who have a network of help and support for each other.  In the Ante Room, Agnes gives up her love for Vincent, her brother in law, out of love for her sister, Marie Rose.  In her last novel, "As Music and Splendour", O’Brien portrays 2 Victorian Irish girls, Claire and Rose, who train as opera singers and who also have a mutually supportive relationship, in their work. In addition, in this novel, she writes about openly lesbian relationships among the opera women, and of illicit heterosexual love affairs.
She is a very interesting person and an interesting writer, and her novels have now been republished, and her life and work studied by writers and academics.