A NEW biography of Lady Lavery, the American born wife of Irish painter Sir John Lavery, contains new evidence suggesting she was involved in a secret and passionate affair with Kevin O'Higgins. Cumann na nGaedheal's Minister for Justice and External Affairs and a leading architect of the Irish Free State.
A number of letters written by O'Higgins to Hazel Lavery in the 1920s, which were discovered by O'Higgins's daughter, Mrs Una O'Higgins O'Malley, last year, will be published for the first time in Hazel: A Life of Lady Lavery 1880-1935, by Sine ad McCoole on September 18th.
Although a 1948 biography of O'Higgins by Terence de Vere White suggested that Lady Lavery inserted romantic passages into letters she received from admirers, Mrs O'Higgins O'Malley said on RTE radio yesterday she believes the letters which her father wrote to Lady Lavery are genuine.
"The belief among friends and relatives in London at that time had been, or some any way had believed, that she had embroidered and added to letters which she received and he [de Vere White] refers to that in his biography of my father, though he is not in fact referring to letters from my father", she said. "These letters were not known about at that time and indeed as far as I know these letters were not known about up to about two years ago.
Although Mrs O'Higgins O'Malley said evidence of the affair in the letters came "as a great pain and shock at the time", she had always known her father and Lady Lavery admired each other. Despite these revelations, O'Higgins's family, she said, remember him as a very loving man. "What I'd like to hold on to very strongly in him is the magnanimity and the fortitude and the forgiveness that he displayed in his death", she said.