Kate O’Brien, James Joyce, and the ‘Lonely Genius’

Abstract

Kate O’Brien (1897–1974) enjoyed a significant popularity in the 1930s and 40s as an Irish novelist and playwright. Her work has an interesting contextual relationship with another literary Irish expatriate — James Joyce — who is her most sustained and pervasive literary mentor. Throughout O’Brien’s nine novels, which were published from 1931 to 1958, she invokes and critiques Joyce’s fiction. In addition, his life and work were recurring topics in a wide range of her unpublished material. In these manuscripts, many of which were delivered as public speeches multiple times and substantially revised, O’Brien is a perceptive critic of her countryman, correctly identifying that the central preoccupation of Joyce’s fiction was to find ‘a new way of crying out loud’ and that he was, ultimately, a secretive and isolated artist.¹ O’Brien repeatedly refers to Joyce as a ‘lonely genius’ and emphasizes his Catholic education, eventual rejection of his faith, focus on ‘the truths of the flesh’ in his novels, and status as an exile — all of which she shared. At many points in these manuscripts the very private, even secretive, O’Brien, who almost never spoke or wrote publicly about her writing, seems to be discussing her own life and work as much as Joyce’s. In this essay, I will first discuss the many parallels between O’Brien’s 1941 novel, The Land of Spices —; which, as Aintzane Mentxaka notes, ‘can be seen as a response to Joyce’s first novel, an attempt to provide a “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman”‘ — and then turn to O’Brien’s first novel, Without My Cloak (1931), to show that her career-long conversation with, and response to, Joyce and his work is evident even in this early text.²