Kate O'Brien

Born in Limerick, Kate O'Brien was educated at Laurel Hill convent school and won a scholarship to study English and French at University College Dublin. She worked as a journalist and translator in London and Manchester, and for a year as a governess in Spain, a period which was to exert a profound influence on her thinking and writing. O'Brien's first literary work was a play, Distinguished Villa (1926). Her first novel, Without my Cloak (1931), became a bestseller and won both the Hawthornden and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Its sequel, The Ante-Room, was published in 1934. Her novel Mary Lavelle (1936) was banned for obscenity in Ireland, as was her most famous work, The Land of Spices (1941), because of their veiled allusions to homosexual love. O'Brien responded with Pray for the Wanderer (1938) and The Last of Summer (1943), both critical of the smug puritanism of the Free State under Eamon de Valera. Her most successful novel was That Lady (1946), set in sixteenth-century Spain, which was adapted for the stage and filmed in the 1950s. In 1950 Kate O'Brien settled in County Galway, but returned to England fifteen years later where she died in 1974.