Mary Lavelle by Kate O Brien

This is one of Kate O'Briens most famous novels, which is set in Spain in the 1920s. Mary Lavelle is an Irish girl, whose family are respectably middle class but not well off. Her father is a doctor who is regretful that he has such a large family and tries to get them off his hands, and he is so grumpy and difficult that the boys all leave as soon as they can scrape a living in Ireland or abroad. Mary is very pretty and becomes engaged to a young man John, who works in his uncles's business, but is not earning much. He had been for 3 years in the British army, in the war and then returned to Ireland, where he fell in love with Mary but he wants to be a lot better off before he embarks on having a family. His uncle is well to do and John hopes to be his heir but for now his position is uncertain. Mary feels fondness for John but he has not succeeded in awakening her sexually. She tries to persuade him to get married but he wants to provide for her as well as he can. She suggests that she could go abraod and work as a chaperone/governess to Spanish children for a year or 2, to learn more about the world, and then they could consider marriage. He agrees to this, as Dr Lavelle, Mary's father, is not too pleased with the engagement because it means that Mary is still at home and there seems to be no sign of his being able to get rid of her from his house. Dr Lavelle's hostility makes John uncomfortable, and so Mary, through her convent school, gets a post in Spain, looking after the daughters of a Spanish gentleman, Don Pablo. She likes Spain when she arrives and makes a resolution to learn Spanish. She meets other governesses who are nearly all Irish Catholics, and who almost all seem hostile to the country. She makes friends with 2 of them, Agatha Conlon, who is very religious, and Rose OToole who is lively and fun loving, though around 40. Agatha tells her that most of the "Misses" cant go back to Ireland because they could never make a living there, but they are not happy in Spain. They have a comfortable life, but their chances of marriage are very slim, since they are mostly neither rich nor beautiful and the English speaking community in Spain, mostly mining engineers who have moved there to contribute to industrialising Spain, are mostly British, not Catholic and not about to humble themselves to marry a penniless Irish girl.