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 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 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. <