Mary Lavelle and Kate O'Brien

Mary Lavelle is one of Kate O’Brien’s novels, (published 1936) and set in Spain.  Like another Irish writer, Maura Laverty, Kate spent some time as a young woman, in Spain, working as a governess to a rich Spanish family.

   Maura Laverty found the life restricting and managed to get out of it; she became a secretary instead.  She gradually got into journalism and became a full time writer.  Her alter ego, Delia, in No More than Human, also gave up being a governess and learned shorthand and typing, so that she could get a job in a business setting, which gave her more independence. 

Kate O’Brien seems to have enjoyed it, and learned a good deal form her time in Spain.   She disagreed with her employer’s family however later on, because she was sympathetic to liberalism and the cause of reform in Spain and they were conservatives.. who sympathized with Franco.
O'Brien's books were banned in Franco’s time .     And while while she loved Spain, she was unhappy when the country became a right wing fascistic dictatorship.   (She was also unhappy with Ireland in the post-Independence period, because the culture became extremely conservative and clericalist, with a focus on narrow puritanical Catholicism.  For long periods of her life, She lived in England).

The novel is the story of Mary Lavelle, an Irish middle class girl, who is engaged to a young man in her home town.  They can’t afford to marry as yet, and her father is a doctor, not very well off. 
Dr Lavelle is a disappointed lazy man who has little affection for his children.   So Mary decides to go away and support herself in a job for a year or 2 until her fiancé is able to marry her.   She feels that it would be good for her to get some experience of the world, outside the narrow confinement of provincial Irish life in the 1920s.  Ironically, while the Irish people hated British rule, the connexion with England and the British empire gave  Irish people some connextion with a wider life.  Many Irish middle class people became officers in the British Army, or moved to London to work...  However after Ireland secured independence it became more provincial, narrow and isolated...and rigidly Catholic....
Mary soon grows to love Spain, unlike many of the other Irish women in her job.  These governesses and chaperones are unhappy with the country, but lack the initiative to give up and find other employment.   They are usually lonely in Spain, since they are not considered the equals of the Spanish upper classes who are their employers, nor of the English colony of engineers and business managers who had also come to Spain in the 20s to work.    Mary finds the company of the other Irish “misses” a bit oppressive, because they are largely concerned with complaining about Spain or trying to find a husband.  
She feels that they are also pathetically snobbish, trying desperately to insist on their status as “ladies” albeit poor ones.  However Mary is more tolerant and when the “Misses” are shocked and angry when Rose O’Toole, one of them, marries a Spanish shop keeper... she is happy for Rosie and visits her.

Mary, being pretty and young and already engaged, is more willing to learn about Spain and to enjoy her time there.  She is interested in the politics and art of Spain, though she never learns to appreciate “Moorish Spain”.   Her employer Don Pablo is a liberal, who has devoted much of his time and money to workers' education and similar causes.  His son Juan is an up and coming reformist politician and he is married with a small baby. 

Mary begins to grow up during her time there; she has not realized that she does not really love her fiancé, John, nor does she find him sexually attractive.   

She begins to be attracted to Juan, who is handsome, charming and intelligent... and he returns her admiration. He loves his wife, but she and he are a little at odds because he is devoted to his liberal political career and she is more of a socialite.

He and Mary are sincere Catholics, and don’t want to end up in an affair.  Divorce is not a possibility either in Ireland or Spain.  Eventually Mary decides to return to Ireland, to get away from the difficult situation… but she and Juan make love.  She realizes that she must end her engagement to John, and she decides to go back home and tell him of this – and to go away then and find another job.   Like many of Kate O’Brien’s heroines, (perhaps reflecting the times they lived in) she does not have a focus on a particular job or career – but all the same, her world is not completely bounded by the idea of marriage or men. She does want to work as well as love, and she is interested in the political situation in Spain...

In “Land of Spices” Anna Murphy, the heroine is only 17 when this book ends and she wants to go University and get an education, rather than go into a “ladylike” job, in a bank as her impoverished family want.  But it’s not clear what sort of work Anna will take up... Her focus is on the getting of an education.
 O’Brien’s last novel “As Music and Splendor” has 2 heroines, Rose and Claire who are both opera singers, so they are career women, but in the world of the performing arts where women are “allowed” to work and to have romantic lives. Even so, they are for many people considered outside of “respectable” society.

In another late O’Brien novel, “The Flower of May”,   the novel centres on 2 young girls, Fanny (who has just left school) and Lucille a Belgian aristocrat, who also wants an education.  Fanny’s aunt, Eleanor, has a small estate, which she makes over to her niece, so as to give the girl enough money to go to University and learn... and to prepare herself for some kind of career.  There is an emphasis in O’Brien’s  books on women supporting each other, while they still allow themselves to have relationships with men.  At times, I think that she uses adultery, usually set in a foreign context, as a transgression which “stands in” for lesbian love, which she did not usually write about.   

However in Mary Lavelle, she does have an explicitly lesbian character, Agatha Conlon, the book was banned in Ireland)...  Agatha is aware that her feelings for Mary are considered wrong in the Catholic faith, but Mary is more tolerant of them, since she too has a “forbidden love” for a married man.  (It was because of the lesbian character and Mary's affair with Juan that the book was banned in Ireland). 

“Mary Lavelle” ends rather sadly, with Juan’s good hearted elderly father dying from his secret heart condition..and with Mary and Juan feeling guilty that he and Mary were together when his father was so ill.    The lovers part, but they have their special memory.  And Mary has been freed from the conventional relationship with John which would probably have never made her happy.   She has grown up, in a way she would not have done had she stayed in Ireland.

I hope to write some blogs about other O’Brien novels in the near future.