In praise of Kate O’Brien, by Anthony Glavin

All too aware of an acclaimed Irish writer I’d never read, I asked a friend a few years back where I might start with Kate O’Brien. Her novel Mary Lavelle I was told, and my friend was dead right. Banned in Ireland in 1936, its captivating account of a young Irish woman’s year as a governess in Spain in 1922 bowled me over with its weave of flawless prose, in-depth casting and mesmerising plot, all in service of its heartbroken story of illicit love. I’m still happily making my way through the rest of O’Brien’s oeuvre. The Land of Spices, with its own magnificent characterisation, similarly banned in 1941, is my current bedside read, and I’m still all but stopping strangers to ask have they too discovered, however belatedly, one of our finest novelists?

Homage here also to Enda O’Brien, whose consummately-crafted New Yorker short stories I first ecountered back in the 1970s, along with those of Massachusetts-born Irish writer Mary Lavin, both of whose brillance had me dare wonder might I some day attempt to take on that formidable genre.

"Men were conceited and ponderous about their purpose in life, but love, though it cooled more easily than ambition, gave as a rule more immediate satisfactions. Gave children too…"
from Mary Lavelle

Boston-born Anthony Glavin is a novelist, short story writer and editor.