An Ideal City. Kate O’Brien and Rome

Abstract

What was Kate O’Brien’s ideal of Rome and how did the eternal city influence her imagination? In this essay I want to provide a context for the Italian travel writings of the Irish novelist Kate O’Brien, published in the late 1950s and early 1960s in various journals and magazines and reproduced here. I suggest that context by arguing that Rome provided O’Brien with a vital source of inspiration and a new departure as a novelist at a time of some difficulty in her writing life. Born in Limerick in 1897, Kate O’Brien spent most of her writing career in London from the early 1930s onwards, publishing popular novels and working as a reviewer, broadcaster and travel writer. After a brief marriage, she lived the rest of her life in relationships with other women. Her novels, although accessible and widely read, also featured radical and subversive representations of lesbian and gay sexuality at a time of criminalisation and marginality for the sexually other. For this reason, two of her novels, Mary Lavelle (1936) and The Land of Spices (1941), were banned in Ireland for obscenity. Despite this banning and subsequent negative public discussion of her work, O’Brien left London and returned to live in Ireland in the early 1950s. She settled in Roundstone, Co. Galway where she bought a large house and continued to write her novels and essays. However, by the mid 1950s, her inspiration appeared to be flagging as she struggled to complete what was to be her final novel, As Music and Splendour (1958). The expense of maintaining a large house on her free-lance earnings also became a problem for her and a trip to Italy was a solution, as a place to escape her money problems and to try and locate a new source of inspiration for her novel. As a young woman, she had lived in Spain and two of her novels had Spanish settings but, now for the first time, in the late 1950s, Italy became the location for her imaginative and critical writings and with fruitful results. Rome was to aid her in the creation of her most radical and progressive novel.