Kate O'Brien

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KOB , twentieth-century Irish writer, was successively a journalist, playwright, novelist, essayist, travel writer, and biographer. She was, she said, influenced by the singing voice and by dance music. Masefield said, Don't despise dance music; it is the music hearts break to.
Reynolds, Lorna. Kate O’Brien: A Literary Portrait. Colin Smythe; Barnes and Noble.
prelims
Her fiction often focuses on an Irish female protagonist's search for love and freedom. She shows such a quest as generally unsuccessful: love does not prove lasting, and spiritual and physical freedom often turn out to be mutually incompatible.

Milestones

3 December 1897

KOB was born at Limerick in Ireland, the seventh of nine children, four of them girls.
Reynolds, Lorna. Kate O’Brien: A Literary Portrait. Colin Smythe; Barnes and Noble.
27

January 1940

KOB , posting a letter late on a rainy evening in the London blackout, felt suddenly invaded by what seemed to be an entire novel which I was one day to write and which was to be called That Lady.
Reynolds, Lorna. Kate O’Brien: A Literary Portrait. Colin Smythe; Barnes and Noble.
70

By late 1946

KOB published the novel which until recent feminist re-discovery of her was probably her best-known, the historical fiction That Lady.
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford.

13 August 1974

KOB died in hospital at Canterbury in England.
Reynolds, Lorna. Kate O’Brien: A Literary Portrait. Colin Smythe; Barnes and Noble.
133

Biography

Birth and Family

3 December 1897

KOB was born at Limerick in Ireland, the seventh of nine children, four of them girls.
Reynolds, Lorna. Kate O’Brien: A Literary Portrait. Colin Smythe; Barnes and Noble.
27