Kate O’Brien’s Limerick Life

 

Boru House in Limerick is a late Victorian house that served as a family home and as headquarters of a thriving 19th-century horse trading enterprise owned and run by one of Limericks merchant princes. It is located on Mulgrave Street, “the street of bad, mad and dead” and was once occupied by Limericks controversial feminist writer, “a pioneer in Irish fiction”[1] Kate O’Brien. This article explores the influence of Boru House on the writer’s sense of place and religious beliefs. O’Brien’s tumultuous bourgeois childhood, Irish catholic middle class experience and early teenage years at Boru House obeying the rigorous rules of middle class convention led to her being a social, political and spiritual outcast and recluse. She was, by many accounts, an ‘outsider’ born and raised in a house unbefitting its time and location and as such it too was an ‘outsider’ and she became the personification of its character. However, O’Brien’s continued local, national and international success and veneration as a writer testifies to the significance of land and belief in the formation years of an artist and individual.

One of Limerick’s most famous structures is the Victorian Boru House on Mulgrave Street. It is an elaborate late Victorian house built by the grandfather of controversial Limerick writer Kate O’Brien (1897-1974). One of ten children born of Tom O’Brien (1853-1916) and Katty Thornhill (1864-1903), her grandfather Thomas O’Brien Snr moved to Limerick in 1852 after eviction from his Bruree home.[2] Kate wrote about him, “This Tom O’Brien was by Kilfinane standards, indeed by any, a man of the world. He was in fact a child of the post-famine evictions, for his father had been turned out of his small- holding near-by, in Bruree county – about 1850, and had made his way with wife, young daughter and two sons, and with a few household remnants on an ass-cart, as far as Limerick.”[3] Thomas was a horse dealer, breeder and supplier to “the imperial economy”[4].

Thomas was also very much aware of the fact that the nearby Fairgreen, “where thousands of horses are to be seen”[5] was the home of one of Ireland’s largest frequent Horse Fair’s and in 1880 he built Boru House a mere fifty yards or so away from the fairgrounds. It was a solid red brick dwelling. While its name and the arm and sword that perch on top of it conjure up shades of Brian Boru, the carriage wheel design on the stable gates are symbols of her father’s trade for, like his father before him, he was a horse breeder and dealer.[6] In fact on so large a scale was the business that one of Kate’s uncles lived permanently abroad where they mounted cavalry officers in many countries, sold hunters to all the great masters of Foxhounds, and matched carriage horses for the nobility. [7]

Limerick was rapidly becoming the horse capital of western Ireland and there were ongoing efforts to arrange the revival of the Limerick Horse Show and every effort would be made to “request the citizens of Limerick to subscribe and nothing be left undone to ensure the success of the show.”[8] Horses provided much of the locomotion and power of the age, and the O’Brien’s’ provided the horses for the merchants, the clergy and the garrison. Such was the wealth of Tom O’Brien that he could afford to buy some historic O’Brien diamonds from the Earls of Clare and have them set in a ring for his wife.[9]

Mulgrave Street had expanded during the 19th century due to rural migrants reflecting a rising local urban modernity. Mulgrave Street housed new institutions including the Artillery Barracks (1807), County Infirmary (1811), County Gaol (1821), District Lunatic Asylum and Mount Saint Lawrence Cemetery (1849)[10]The modern institutionalisation of space in O’Brien’s early life milieu imbued her with an awareness of the centrality of place as a means to anchor essential themes.[11]

Limerick born broadcaster and journalist David Hanly in 1980 had vivid memories of his childhood on Mulgrave Street, “It was a place of curiosity, in my childhood it had not yet suffered the shock of burgeoning suburbia. It was a quiet place; the clock at the mental hospital dominated the street. On one side of the street was a prison, an asylum and a graveyard, a street inhabited by the bad, mad and the dead. On the other side were social climbers, shop keepers and the fairly well off.”[12] A former neighbour of the O’Brien’s, Mickey Hanrohan also had fond memories of the O’Brien family when he wrote to the Sunday Press as to how he had lived next door to Boru House, stating, ‘I kept a few Pigeons next door and could be seen from O’Brien’s Nursery. Master Jack, Miss May, Tom and Kate and Mrs O’ Mara brought me Pigeons from Shannon View their Uncle Michael’s Home & Stables.’[13]

Born in 1897 into a, “comfortable, relatively privileged Limerick of the merchant princes,”[14] She arrived at a time when the family business was enjoying exceptional success because of the recent re-arrival of the 1st Battalion Royal Irish Regiment to Limerick to their newly refurbished Barracks and in need of horses.[15] Furthermore, her Grandfather was campaigning on behalf of the cash-strapped farmers of Ireland who were being forced to pay exceptionally high sire fees which was resulting in a nationwide crisis in the horse breeding industry. He told a special hearing in Dublin, “The farmers of Ireland cannot afford to pay the fees demanded by sire owners owing to the bad times, and farmers should be helped by the Government to get good thoroughbred sires cheap.”[16]

Kate was a girl in the revolutionary period, but her provincial bourgeois family had no place, or obvious interest, in the political ferments of the time. This aspect of “Irishness” hardly makes an appearance in her work.[17] However, her father was an ardent supporter of Parnell and greatly believed in the importance of Limerick in the early days of the Home Rule campaign.[18]

Although Kate only spent the first 18 years of her life in Limerick, the city had a powerful and lasting influence on her life and on her writings[19]. Her daring literary perspective dissected and critiqued the social and political milieu of the Catholic petite bourgeoisie which supported the adoption of the 1937 constitution that imposed a quasi-religious and patriarchal structure of political architecture upon the fledgling post-independent nation.

Fianna Fail’s social legislation of the 1930s was increasingly vetted by a staunch right-wing Catholic hierarchy. In tandem with cultural nationalism the State and Church had determinedly ‘anathematized everything from jazz to modern fiction.[20] Subsequently, writers such as O’Brien would face the reviled Censorship Board in 1929.’[21] She was one of the first Irish writers to focus on the crisis of being a woman in a man’s world.[22]

Limerick impacted on O’Brien, “It was there that I began to view the world and to develop the necessary passion by which to judge it. It was there indeed that I learnt the world and I know that wherever I am it is still from Limerick that I look out and make my surmises. It is really all you know about yourself – that life began, that you became involved, that you asked all your leading questions there in Limerick.”[23] The O’Brien siblings mixed socially with the sons and daughters of other middle class families such as the Egans, O’Maras, Ebrills, Gaffneys and Bourkes, and went pony-riding and to parties with them, especially during holiday times.

Life was not all work for the merchants and the professional classes. Drinking, dancing, race-going, hunting, card-playing, dinner-partying, womanising, discussing politics and religion filled much of their leisure hours. In this world the role of women was rigidly defined and regulated. Housekeeping, breeding, child-rearing and serving as decorative appendages of their husbands was their socially ordained functions. But for single women the social pressures and tensions were inescapable. Without a husband, a woman was automatically relegated to an inferior status. The iron laws of convention decreed that young women should marry in their first flush of youth. To remain “on the shelf” was to be stigmatised as an ‘old maid.’[24]

 Jim Kemmy (1936-1997) said, “It is over simplifying Kate O’Brien’s attitude to say she had a love hate relationship with Limerick.” She had ambivalence and uneasiness because she found it restrictive, claustrophobic and oppressive. She knew little about Limerick’s proletariat and this was obvious in 1949 when she told Harvey Brett of the New York Times, “Poverty and backwardness doesn’t seem to me the kinds of soil out of which great novels come.”[25] Kemmy further elaborates on this, “She captured for all time the ethos of the middle class commercial Limerick as it was at the turn of the century; the lifestyle and mores of the Catholic merchant princes of the city.” She didn’t understand the Limerick of the working people but she loved the city and its history and almost all her writing is redolent of this affection.”[26]

In her writings she explored the unnatural sterility and cruel idleness of mind and body of middle class women. Dr Lorna Reynolds of UCD suggests the ‘holier than thou’ attitude was anathema to her, “Catholicism seemed not to know that ignorance is not innocence, and without freedom to choose there is no virtue.”[27] Describing herself as a ‘Catholic Agnostic’ O’Brien wrote with some sense of remembered pleasure about religion, religion as hindrance, religion as refuge, religion as the moral reliquary, religion as motivating force; force rather than passion.[28]

Her novel The Ante Room is arguably the quintessential example of how Limerick impacted on her, “for all its melodrama it is extremely important in the context of O’Brien’s understanding of Irish society, particularly that of the Irish Catholic middle class and its self imposed vulnerabilities.” [29] The novel is sharp, multifaceted and portrays a narrow society, highlighting the small mindedness which sustains and oppresses it. Class fears undercut much of O’Brien’s work. Social exposure is viewed as the greatest shame in a world in which sexual or romantic deviation is so damning their deeper implications are unacknowledged.

O’Brien has been described as an “outsider”, “O’Brien remains a literary outsider; an independently minded maverick”,[30] her wealthy merchant bourgeoisie class, boarding school years, sexuality, relationship with Catholicism and significantly her Anglophile ideology was not part of the founding myth of the new Ireland. She admired the values and manners of her own early 20th Century bourgeoisie class in popular political culture and class consciousness. These idiosyncrasies were not unique but symbolic of a class attacked by a new era of nationalistic and religious influences.[31]

It was O’Brien who first and most comprehensively chronicled the rise of the Irish Catholic middle class experience. O’Brien’s lasting contribution to Irish literature is her exploration of a specific way of life and the many repressions which helped shape it. She was a formidable woman; a rebel, a loner, a traveller, a believer in education’s saving power for women, an astute political and cultural prophet, and a woman both of her time and beyond it, a European. Above all, perhaps, she is both storyteller and social historian.[32]

Kate’s bittersweet romance with her own indelibly linked land and belief manifests itself in later writings, “My life began in Limerick, my memories start there and to weave and wind from that first focus.” She sees her land as “grave but surprising and corrective of literary fancies.” Its first manner is sceptical, quiet and deprecatory. And of her religious beliefs, “Limerick’s churches are the very life and expression of the place, for comedy and anger, conviction and pride, music and formality, for ceremony – and always for prayer.”[33]

The structure of Boru House remains unchanged. It is a detached six-bay, two-storey polychrome red brick building with a single-bay two-storey gabled entrance and a three-sided canted bay window to the west. The use of polychrome brickwork in conjunction with stonework and the coursing of the eaves brickwork are all typical of the closing decades of the nineteenth century. The house has some non-domestic characteristics because it also functioned as the head quarters of the then prosperous family business.[34]

The national and local social and political climates of 1880 were at odds with the affluence of the O’Brien family. Many Limerick citizens were feeling the impact of poverty, famine, rural agitation and political unrest. County Limerick ratepayers had to pay more than most other counties for additional Royal Irish Constabulary because of Land League agitation.[35] There were demands of emigrants to financially intervene to rescue the country from the abyss of British suppression, aggression and enslavement. The founding of the Irish National Land League in the USA was the response and aimed to abolish landlordism and enable poor tenant farmers to possess their own land.[36]

Amidst this social milieu Kate’s grandfather built a substantial business and his rise from evicted tenant farmer to prosperous dealer in bloodstock was rapid and attest to his fortitude. He was an assertive, pompous and determined man and went about building the substantial Boru House beside his paddock and stables. He insisted that the house had the O’Brien coat of arms emblazoned onto the roof ridge. His granddaughter was proud of her birthplace, her origins and her class. They provide the settings for many of her novels.[37]

Kate’s formative years at Boru House influenced her writing. After her mother’s death of cancer in 1903 Kate studied at Laurel Hill Convent before progression to UCD, a fellow student writing as Quidnunc in the Irish Times in 1936 recalls, “When I remember her as a student at the National University she was a very pretty girl.”[38] Irish Broadcaster Ciaran Mac Mathuna (1925-2009) was born and grew up in a house on Mulgrave Street about 50 yards from the O’Brien family home. “It was a strange looking house; they were a strange family,” he remarks.[39]

If strange is a good word to use to describe her family then it is equally as good to describe her writings. Her play ‘Distinguished Villa’ (1928) launched her career. Her novel, chronicling middle class Irish life, ‘Without My Cloak’ (1931) demonstrated her main themes, Irish women’s struggle for freedom against family, society and Catholicism. The heroine of ‘The Ante Room’ (1934) is torn between love and Catholicism, so is ‘Mary Lavelle’ (1936), it was banned under censorship laws, as was ‘The Land of Spices’ on May 5th, 1941: “A prohibition order is placed on Kate O’Brien’s ‘The Land of Spices’ by the Censor, due to a sentence hinting at a homosexual act”[40], O’Brien later stated of the Irish censorship Board, “It’s five old gentlemen. I don’t know who they are. Just five old gentlemen who, when they get a complaint, read the book, and decide on whether to take action or not. Censorship is a disgrace, it’s too silly, and puts Ireland in a ridiculous position.”[41] O’Brien’s most successful novel was ‘That Lady’ (1946).[42]

Constructing an elaborate dwelling in impoverished Limerick was extravagant. Local people experienced food shortages that Britain doubted, “this famine fever is an outbreak of typhus.’[43] A view challenged in Ireland, “Epidemic fever follows famine.”[44] But ‘An Gorta Beag’caused hunger not death. It was due to new food production techniques, different structures of land-holding and the disappearance of the sub-division of land and cottiers. A combination of Irish emigrant’s donations and British political promptness controlled the starvation.[45]

To Kate such issues were of little concern. She talks in autobiographical writings of a happier childhood, “scenes of early childhood are those which shine clearest. We discover our childhood at the end of life as if it were something sculpted when much of the rest of us is by every good right dead or dead-alive”.[46]

According to her cousin Don Thornhill in 2008 Kate’s happy childhood came from money which became a theme in her Limerick (romantically fictionalised as Mellick) novels, “Her characters are at ease with money.” John Broderick wrote of her in 1963, “Since most novelists are preoccupied throughout their lives by the world of their childhood and youth, it is not surprising that Miss O’Brien’s imagination is apt to linger on those years immediately before the First World War: the last days of the great 19th century peace. Her milieu is that of the rich Catholic merchants of Limerick before the lights went out all over Europe.” It was a comfortable, leisurely world; casually accepting values which it imagined at the time to be immortal; and imbued with those subtle, generous and slightly diffident manners. It is out of this rich background with its solid Victorian conventions and its age-old Catholicism that Miss O’Brien’s heroines emerge.[47]

There are other themes influenced by Boru House. Her Anglophile tendency is easily traced, “English regiments flirted and courted among Limerick women with traditional allure, my memory tells me, they must have been an answer to life, those enemy troops, if not literally an answer to prayer”[48] She was embittered by the growing influence of Irish nationalism leading to the 1918 collapse of her family’s fortune and loss of Boru House thus rendering her homeless.[49]

O’Brien draws from this experience when she reminisces on her childhood amid British military surroundings, “Yes, it was a gay town, within memory, when the troops were in; up to 1914. It was a garrison town, and did not deny itself this glitter and spangle. The married women of Limerick around the time I am remembering were often gay and gentle with the fair-haired lieutenants and trim captains from ‘across’. Troops are no longer gay, in any part of the world; the decorative thin notion died around 1914.”[50]

June 1916 marked a turning point in the family’s financial affairs because of her father’s death. The Limerick Chronicle newspaper reported on the funeral, “The cortege was of large proportions and testified to the esteem in which the deceased was held in the city and the sympathy felt for his family in their great affliction”[51] Following from Kate’s father’s death her uncle Mick O’Brien took over the family business, “always a poor judge of horse-flesh and was not equipped to run the business on his own.” [52] Family debts soon accumulated, forcing Mick to sell his mansion, Shannon View, and to move with his wife to St. John’s Villas, a short distance from Boru House. Kate O’Brien’s brothers and sisters began to scatter, and Boru House was sold to the Lloyd family. Apart from occasional visits, Kate O’Brien was never again to live permanently in her native city.

But in ‘My Ireland’ she fondly retraced her childhood steps. Writing of a striking feature of her birthplace under the shadow of St. John’s Church, “still pointing its holy finger to a recognisable sky” she states, “St. John’s is located in a shabby north-east corner between Garryowen and the slums of Irishtown, it has taken its place since the 1860’s in a tired and history tattered town, as if it was itself a part of the long uneasy record. The church epitomised the town and once ‘a greyish blue on the blue and green and out of it raising a spire they will know that they have arrived at Limerick.”[53]  She later says of her city, “Limerick is full of monumental and ‘forward’ ideas. Our urbs antiqua (ancient city) has been taking a great shake up, and yet she still manages to look quite an old beauty, when you catch her in a good light” [54] In her final years her love for her native city was obvious, “I will be home soon in the very heart of that self confident town which, Limerick woman though I am, I cannot but admit is very easy on the eye.”[55]

O’Brien died in 1974. Her literary legacy is realism of immense psychological intensity, subtle insights and a deceptively physical quality. Her characters for all their repression, touch each other, reach out, and are tactile and emotional. In ‘Pray for the Wanderer’ (1938) she wrote about her life as a writer returning home and perhaps comes closer to explaining her life and work than any critic can. Outsider to the end, she was not above asking for the understanding she never fully received as either artist or individual. Her tombstone bears that title as inscription.[56] Though she was born on Mulgrave Street and spent her formative years there, she did not retain happy memories of the place. She never liked the “ugly” house, as she called it, and was slightly embarrassed at her father’s extravagant heraldic device at the top of the building. Boru House is situated directly across the road from St. Joseph’s Mental Hospital and Kate O’Brien always had unpleasant childhood memories of poor, demented patients entering and leaving the asylum grounds. The circumstances leading to the sale of the house had also hurt her.[57]

Critics draw a picture of Kate O’Brien’s life in terms of her childhood, where she lived, her family context, social environment and the Catholic middleclass milieu which dominated her. One of Ireland’s foremost poets Eavan Boland accurately captures the spirit of Kate O’Brien’s childhood Limerick which was struggling upwards. The horrors of the famine lay far behind her. It was a city of style and refinement and a class with a thirst for upward mobility; “Good horse flesh, solid silver and dresses made in Dublin were beginning to prevail.”[58]

The city was starting to attract international attention with a growing demand for Limerick Lace. There is reference to the reviving nationwide Lace making industry with Limerick’s designs being of special interest.[59] But there was also urban unrest, for example, in 1897 The Bishop of Limerick had to intervene in negotiations to bring an amicable solution to striking Irish bacon trade workers in Limerick. Angry producers refused to sell to pig buyers until profiteering middlemen agents or so called ‘blockers’, men who purchased at fairs and resold thus reducing the price to producers, were dispensed with.[60] In the midst of this were a class who were Catholic Ireland but never Nationalist Ireland, “A constellation of perhaps blinkered, smug lives, political blindness, the mainstays of a society but only at the cost of ignoring many more urgent and more powerful realities.”[61]

Kate O’Brien was a pioneering writer and her contribution to Irish literature and to an understanding of the psychology and sexuality of women has not yet been fully recognised. She was a warm-hearted and fallible human being who believed in the primacy of the feelings of the heart. Her writings are a record of her life and passions. It comes as no surprise to learn that her favourite quotation was George Santayana’s “The holiness of the heart’s affections”. Kate O’Brien was an intellectual and a profound writer. A full assessment of her work is long overdue, but it can be said with certainty that she assured Limerick and its people of an enduring place in Irish literature.[62]

Many of O’Brien’s books deal with issues of female agency and sexuality in ways that were new and radical at the time. Throughout her life, O’Brien felt a particular affinity with Limerick. O’Brien was committed to progressive politics.  A feminist, her novels promoted gender equality and were mostly protagonised by young women yearning for independence.[63] Boru House clearly influenced the writer Kate O’Brien’s sense of place and religious beliefs. Her chaotic childhood, Irish catholic experience and teenage years obeying the meticulous rules of middle class life led to her being an ‘outsider’ but her writings continue to command the respect and adoration of her peers. O’Brien was an ‘outsider’ born and raised in a house incongruous to its time and place and consequently an ‘outsider’ too. O’Brien personified the character of Boru House. But her continued local, national and international success and veneration as a writer testifies to the significance of land and belief in the formative years of an artist and individual.

 

 

 

[1]The Kate O’Brien Papers, University of Limerick, (Special Collections) Available at: http://www2.ul.ie/pdf/57753018.pdf Accessed On: November 20th 2013. p.i.

[2] Humphreys Family Tree, The O’Briens Family Tree, Available At: http://humphrysfamilytree.com/OMara/obrien.html Accessed On: 11th November 2013.

[3]Kate O’Brien, My Ireland quoted in Jim Kemmy, Kate O’Brien’s Limerick  in The Old Limerick Journal, Vol 17, Winter 1984

[4]Irish Times, 2006

[5]Irish Times, 1897

[6] Limerick Leader, 2007

[7]Irish Times, 1981

[8]Irish Times, 1897.

[9]Kate O’Brien, My Ireland quoted in Jim Kemmy, Kate O’Brien’s Limerick  in The Old Limerick Journal, Vol 17, Winter 1984

[10] J. Logan,  Family and Fortune in Kate O’Brien’s Limerick, in With Warmest Love: Lectures for Kate O’Brien, 1984-1993, (Limerick: Mellick Press, 1994) p. 115.

[11] Trinity College Dublin, Digital Literary Atlas of Ireland: Writers: Kate O’Brien Available At: http://www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub/digital-atlas/writers/kate-obrien/ Accessed On 15th November 2013.

[12]David Hanly, Memories of Mulgrave Street, in Old Limerick Journal, Vol 2, March 1980.

[13] The Kate O’Brien Papers, University of Limerick, (Special Collections) Available at: http://www2.ul.ie/pdf/57753018.pdf Accessed On: November 20th 2013. p.80

[14]Irish Times, 1994

[15]Irish Times, 1897

[16]Freemans Journal, 1897

[17]Irish Times, 2006

[18]Irish Times, 1994

[19]Jim Kemmy, Kate O’Brien’s Limerick  in The Old Limerick Journal, Vol 17, Winter 1984

[20] Roy Foster, Modern Ireland, 535.

[21] Ibid.

[22]Limerick Leader, 1990

[23]Kate O’Brien, My Ireland quoted in Jim Kemmy, Kate O’Brien’s Limerick  in The Old Limerick Journal, Vol 17, Winter 1984

[24]Kate O’Brien, My Ireland quoted in Jim Kemmy, Kate O’Brien’s Limerick  in The Old Limerick Journal, Vol 17, Winter 1984

[25]New York Times, 1949

[26]Irish Times, 1981

[27]Irish Times, 1984

[28]Irish Times, 1987

[29]Irish Times, 1997

[30]Ibid

[31]Kate O Brien, Limerick  in Old Limerick Journal, Vol 3, June 1980.

[32]Irish Times, 1997

[33]Kate O Brien, Limerick in Old Limerick Journal, Vol 3, June 1980.

[34]National Inventory of Architectural Heritage, Boru House, Mulgrave Street, Blackboy Road, Limerick City. Available At:http://www.buildingsofireland.ie/niah/search.jsp?type=record&county=LI&regno=21519001 Accessed On: 10th November 2013.

[35]Irish Times 1897.

[36] Diarmaid Ferriter, The Transformation of Ireland, 1900–2000, Profile Books, London (2004), pp. 62–63

[37] Don Thornhill (Speech), Kate O’Brien On Transforming Power, Kate O’Brien Weekend (1.03.2008), Limerick.

[38]Irish Times, 1936

[39]Irish Times, 1996

[40]Irish Times, 1941

[41]New York Times, 1949

[42] Limerick Post, 2008

[43] Belfast Newsletter, 1880

[44]Nenagh Guardian, 1880

[45] New York Times, “The Herald of Relief from America”, Available At: http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/harp/0228.html  Accessed On: 12th November 2013

[46]Kate O’Brien, Warmest Love, Old Limerick Journal, Vol 4, September 1980.

[47]Irish Press, 1963

[48]Kate O Brien, Limerick in Old Limerick Journal, Vol 3, June 1980.

[49] Don Thornhill (Speech), Kate O’Brien On Transforming Power, Kate O’Brien Weekend (1.03.2008), Limerick.

[50]Kate O Brien, Limerick in Old Limerick Journal, Vol 3, June 1980.

[51]Limerick Chronicle, 1916

[52]Kate O’Brien, My Ireland quoted in Jim Kemmy, Kate O’Brien’s Limerick  in The Old Limerick Journal, Vol 17, Winter 1984

[53]Kate O Brien, Limerick in Old Limerick Journal, Vol 3, June 1980.

[54]Irish Times, 1969

[55]Irish Times, 1971.

[56]Irish Times, 1997

[57]Jim Kemmy, Kate O’Brien’s Limerick  in The Old Limerick Journal, Vol 17, Winter 1984

[58]Irish Times, 1985

[59]Irish Times, 1897

[60]Ibid

[61]Irish Times, 1985

[62]Jim Kemmy, Kate O’Brien’s Limerick  in The Old Limerick Journal, Vol 17, Winter 1984

[63] A.L. Mentxaka, Kate O’Brien and the Fiction of Identity (McFarland, 2011)