Kate O'Brien's Writings

Overlooked by many contemporary readers, the midcentury Irish author Kate O'Brien is largely dismissed as a romantic novelist. Margaret O'Neill's innovative new book aims to reset these reductive views and bring wider attention to a multifaceted writer whose work encompassed fiction, drama, and journalism. Blending traditional biography with novelistic techniques, O'Neill examines the social and cultural impact of O'Brien's writing, which itself moved between genres to take on issues of consumerism, environmental concern, and Irish politics. This book is the first to examine a wealth of new archival materials housed at the University of Limerick and the National Library of Ireland that provide fresh insights about O'Brien and the cultural circles in which she moved. In whatever form they took, O'Brien's writings reveal her to be an incisive critic of the social and cultural mores of her time. Decades later, her penetrating feminist commentary on the early years of the Irish republic will provide fresh inspiration for writers seeking to defend personal and political freedom in the twenty-first century.