Kate O’Brien honoured in her hometown

The 40th anniversary of the death of one of our truly great female writers will be remembered at the 2014 Limerick Literary Festival from tonight until Sunday. Many well-known names will participate in the festival which honours Limerick-born novelist and playwright Kate O’Brien.

Born into a prosperous Limerick family in 1897, O’Brien began her writing career in 1926. Without My Cloak, published in 1930, was her first bestseller. Always a keen and trenchantly truthful writer, many of her books deal with issues of female sexuality in ways that were very new and indeed radical at the time. Her 1936 novel, Mary Lavelle (utilising the writer’s own experiences working in the Basque country), was banned in both Ireland and Spain, while The Land of Spices, dealing with student-nun relationships in a convent, was banned in Ireland.

Outspokenly critical of Irish censorship, O’Brien did much to end the cultural restrictions of the 1930s and ’40s in this country. And of course, like so many others, she paid the price by chosen exile in England, where she died in 1974. Hugely popular in her time, she was forgotten for many decades until her rediscovery in the 1980s. Now she is once more recognised as she always deserved to be.