Abstract
Born and raised in Limerick and then a boarder at Laurel Hill Convent school in the city, much of Kate O’Brien’s writing reflects upon the city, particularly the development of its social milieu over the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as well as the expansion and commercialisation of the 1960s. Though she travelled and explored settings familiar in a European paradigm of modernism, Limerick remained a central concern and the influence of the city may be read across her life and works. This chapter will explore the ambivalent nature of the relationship between O’Brien and her home city, considering the social changes and tensions of modernity, the creation of the Catholic middle class, and the position of the woman and artist within it. It will also explore how O’Brien’s writings contribute to debates about the spatial and temporal boundaries of modernism, arguing that O’Brien’s emphasis on the regional as well as the transnational draws attention to multiple modernities and provides for expanding our understanding of Irish and women’s modernisms and the complexities of the modern.
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Notes
- 1.
‘T.P. Pays Tribute to Talented Limerick Lady,’ Excerpt from T.P.’s and Cassell’s Weekly, reprinted in Limerick Leader, August 23, 1926, 4.
- 2.
Kate O’Brien, My Ireland (London: B.T. Batsford, 1962), 148.
- 3.
Nels Pearson, Irish Cosmopolitanism: Location and Dislocation in James Joyce , Elizabeth Bowen and Samuel Beckett (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2015), 83.
- 4.
Sean O’Casey, qtd. in Eibhear Walshe, Kate O’Brien A Writing Life (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2006), 40.
- 5.
Kate O’Brien, qtd. in Eibhear Walshe, Kate O’Brien: A Writing Life (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2006), 39.
- 6.
Anthony Roche, ‘The Ante-Room as Drama’ in Ordinary People Dancing: Essays on Kate O’Brien , ed. Eibhear Walshe (Cork: Cork University Press, 1993), 89.
- 7.
Toril Moi, ‘First and Foremost a Human Being’: Idealism, Theatre, and Gender in A Doll’s House,’ Modern Drama, 49, no. 3 (Fall 2006): 256.
- 8.
Michael O’Toole, ‘Peasants to Princes,’ Management: Journal of Irish Management Institute, December 1995: n.p.
- 9.
Kate O’Brien, Presentation Parlour (London: Heinemann, 1963), 22.
- 10.
Ibid.
- 11.
Ibid.
- 12.
Ibid., 15–16.
- 13.
Eavan Boland, ‘The Treasury of Kate O’Brien’s Achievement,’ ‘Women’s Press,’ The Irish Press, December 12, 1970, 8.
- 14.
O’Brien, My Ireland, 16. As she states, ‘I feel a desire to assemble in some sort the scattered impressions which Ireland has made on me over the years. No autobiography, need I say?’ (ibid.).
- 15.
Eavan Boland, Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2006), xii.
- 16.
Eavan Boland, ‘Continuing the Encounter’ in Ordinary People Dancing: Essays on Kate O’Brien , ed. Eibhear Walshe (Cork: Cork University Press, 1993), 21.
- 17.
Matthew, L Reznicek, The European Metropolis: Paris and Nineteenth-Century Irish Women Novelists (Clemson University Press, 2017), 5.
- 18.
O’Brien, My Ireland, 178.
- 19.
Kate O’Brien, Without My Cloak (New York: Doubleday, 1931), 3–5.
- 20.
Charles Travis, ‘The ‘Historical Poetics’ of Kate O’Brien’s Limerick: A Critical Literary Geography of Saorstát Éireann and the 1937 Bunreacht na hÉireann Plebiscite,’ Irish Geography, 42, no. 3 (November 2009): 328.
- 21.
O’Brien, Without My Cloak, 10.
- 22.
Ibid.
- 23.
Ibid.
- 24.
Rita Felski, Doing Time: Feminist Theory and Postmodern Culture (New York and London: New York University Press, 2000), 25–6.
- 25.
Ibid., 3.
- 26.
Ibid.
- 27.
Kate O’Brien (1941), The Land of Spices (London: Virago, 2002), 157.
- 28.
The O’Mara Papers: Calendar of Kate O’Brien Material. Letter from Kate O’Brien to Anne (Nance) O’Mara, March 11, 1941. 795(5). Special Collections, University of Limerick.
- 29.
Lorna Reynolds, ‘Kate O’Brien and her “Dear Native Place”,’ Ireland of the Welcomes, September–October, 1990: 35.
- 30.
Kate O’Brien (1958), As Music and Splendour (London: Penguin Books, 2006), 8.
- 31.
This reading of As Music and Splendour first appeared in my article ‘Kate O’Brien: Writer Wanderer, Revolutionary’ for the Women’s Museum of Ireland. http://womensmuseumofireland.ie/articles/kate-o-brien.
- 32.
O’Brien, ‘Limerick, as I Remember It,’ 51.
- 33.
Ibid., 4.
- 34.
Reznicek, The European Metropolis, 6.
- 35.
O’Brien, My Ireland, 30.
- 36.
Ibid.
- 37.
Ibid.
- 38.
Kate O’Brien, ‘Long Distances,’ Irish Times, April 7, 1969.
- 39.
Laura Arrington, ‘Irish Modernism,’ in Oxford Research Encyclopaedia of Literature. Subject: British, Irish, Scottish, and Welsh Literatures. Online Publication Date: Feb 2017. https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.237. Accessed 17 December 2017. 12.
- 40.
Boland, ‘The Treasury of Kate O’Brien’s Achievement,’ 8.
- 41.
‘Freedom of City for O’Brien,’ Cork Examiner, May 27, 1967, 9.
- 42.
O’Brien, My Ireland, 148.
References
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———. ‘Continuing the Encounter.’ In Ordinary People Dancing, ed. Eibhear Walshe, 15–23. Cork: Cork University Press, 1993.
———. Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time. Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2006.
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———. Mary Lavelle. London: Heinemann. 1936.
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———. Presentation Parlour. London: Heinemann, 1963.
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———. The Ante-Room. London: Virago, 2001.
———. The Land of Spices. London: Virago, 2002.
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Reznicek, Matthew L. The European Metropolis: Paris and Nineteenth Century Irish Women Novelists. Clemson: Clemson University Press, 2017.
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Travis, Charles. ‘The “Historical Poetics” of Kate O’Brien’s Limerick: A Critical Literary Geography of Saorstát Éireann and the 1937 Bunreacht na hÉireann Plebiscite.’ Irish Geography 42, no. 3 (November 2009): 323–341.
Walshe, Eibhear. Kate O’Brien A Writing Life. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2006.
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O’Neill, M. (2018). That Limerick Lady: Exploring the Relationship Between Kate O’Brien and Her City. In: Beville, M., Flynn, D. (eds) Irish Urban Fictions. Literary Urban Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98322-6_3
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