Kate O'Brien - Biography

Biography

Kathleen "Kate" Mary Louie O'Brien was born in Limerick City at the end of the 19th century. Following the death of her mother when she was five, she became a boarder at Laurel Hill convent. She graduated from the newly established University College, Dublin and then went to work at the Manchester Guardian. After the success of her play Distinguished Villa in 1926, she took to full-time writing and was awarded the 1931 James Tait Black Prize for her debut novel Without My Cloak. She is best known for her 1934 novel The Ante-Room, her 1941 novel The Land of Spices, and the 1946 novel That Lady.

Many of her books deal with issues of female sexuality — several of them explore gay/lesbian themes — and both Mary Lavelle and The Land of Spices were banned in Ireland. She also wrote travel books, or rather accounts of places and experiences, on both Ireland and Spain, a country she loved, and which features in a number of her novels. She lived much of her later life in England and died in Canterbury in 1974; she is buried in Faversham Cemetery.

The Glucksman Library at the University of Limerick currently holds a large collection of O'Brien's personal writings. In August 2005, Penguin reissued her final novel, As Music and Splendour (1958), which had been out of print for decades. The Kate O'Brien Weekend, which takes place in Limerick, attracts a large number of people, both academic and non-academic.

In the film, Brief Encounter (1945), Celia Johnson speaks about collecting "the latest Kate O'Brien."