That Lady, by Kate O'Brien

When I re-discovered Kate O'Brien's books and started looking for the ones I hadn't read yet, I put this one on the bottom of my list. A novel about the court of King Philip II of Spain seemed an odd fit with her other books. I had forgotten that her first book, Without My Cloak, is a historical novel, a family story that opens in 1879, and The Ante-Room is set in the 1880s. I was also thinking of her primarily as an Irish writer. From her novel Mary Lavelle and the travelogue Farewell Spain I learned more about her own experiences living and working in Spain, and about her love for the county and its people. In the end, a copy of That Lady found me, turning up on the library sale shelves, a gently-used hardback for all of $1. I read it slowly over the past week, savoring it, and wishing I hadn't been so misguided in my snap judgement.

The lady of the title is Ana de Mendoza y de la Cerda, Princess of Eboli and Duchess of Pastrana. As the story opens, in October of 1576, she is a widow of 36, with six surviving children. She is awaiting the arrival of King Philip at her country estate of Pastrana, east of Madrid in the province of Guadalajara. Ana was a real person, the heiress to an immense fortune and the highest position in Castilian Spain. She was married at age twelve to Philip's political adviser and right-hand man, Ruy Gomez de Silva. (I had already met Ruy, and Philip as well, in Dorothy Dunnett's Lymond Chronicles.) From what I have read, there were a lot of stories and rumors around Ana de Mendoza. She famously fought a duel with one of her father's pages when she was fourteen, during which she lost an eye, and wore a patch over the socket for the rest of her life. There are several portraits of her in existence. I found this one on Wikimedia Commons (source here):

The pictures I found intrigued me, and made me want to know more about Ana de Mendoza.

When King Philip arrives, Ana learns that he has made the trip to ask her to come back to Madrid. There are family matters that need her attention, and he also wants to squelch rumors - that the Princess has gone mad, or has quietly been murdered. Ana is reluctant to leave her quiet country life but she agrees. In Madrid, she makes a decision, to take a lover, which she believes should be a private matter. However, it becomes a public and then a political one, bringing consequences she could never have imagined. Knowing nothing of her story, I became increasingly concerned about how it would end, and I finally gave in and read the last two chapters.

At first this did seem quite different from the books of Kate O'Brien's that I have read. But as Ana's story unfolded, two familiar themes linked it to O'Brien's other books. First, Ana has had her life directed and organized by others, first her parents and then her husband. She accepted it, and she played the roles expected of her. Now, however, she is facing "her general, surprised sense of never having managed to be herself throughout her singularly successful life." For once in her life, she has chosen for herself, and she will take the consequences of that choice. She struggles with the knowledge that her choice is a sin, and with her relationship with God - another theme in O'Brien's books. I was glad that she has a wonderful spiritual counselor in the Cardinal Archbishop of Toledo, one of my favorite characters. He calls her a conceited woman and a self-deluding creature - with a great affection - and tries to convince her to "Pray, child, and love Him. It's not such a very long journey from the love of man to the love of God." Ana's struggles felt very real, and very human, to me.

Kate O'Brien says in a brief Foreword that "What follows is not a historical novel. It is an invention arising from reflection on the curious external story of Ana de Mendoza and Philip II of Spain." She goes on to say that she has "retained the historical outline of events in which they have played a part," but that their words and writings, their thoughts and emotions, are invented. I'm not sure I understand the distinction she was making between a historical novel and an "invention." She certainly didn't pile on the historical detail, and her characters don't speak in ye olde quainte language. One even uses the word "psychology," which certainly didn't exist in the 1570s. But O'Brien evoked the period all the same, in much the same way that Dorothy Dunnett did, partly through simple details of daily life.

I feel like every novel of Kate O'Brien's that I read becomes my new favorite. It's certainly true for this book. I am still thinking about Ana and the other characters, particularly her daughter Anichu (theirs is such a close and loving relationship). And I cannot tell you how much I despise Philip II of Spain just now.

N.B. This novel was published in 1946, adding another year to my Mid-Century of Books.

The Flower of May, by Kate O'Brien

   "But life isn't as Lucille would order it, you stupid child! Life is as men - I say men - make and feel it!"
   "I've noticed already," said Fanny, "that that is men's idea. But my life is mine, and it will be more or less what I make and feel it, I hope."

Fanny Morrow, just eighteen, is speaking to her friend Lucille's brother André on the Ponte Navi in Verona, on an summer evening in 1906. We first meet her several months earlier, at her sister Lilian's wedding in their hometown of Dublin. Fanny, just returned from her convent school in Brussels, is considering entering the convent herself. Instead, she travels to Belgium to stay with Lucille, and then joins the de Mellin family on a visit to Italy. When they return to Belgium, Fanny is called home to a family emergency, and Lucille goes with her, to encounter Ireland for the first time.

Both Fanny and Lucille are searching for their path in life. They know what they want: education and a life beyond the role of decorous daughter, whether in Dublin or Brussels. Lucille's family is wealthy, so she has resources and opportunities that Fanny does not. But she also has a father who hopes to see her marry into a family with business connections to their own - a German family. Fanny's parents have refused to allow her to return to Brussels, to study for her baccalaureate. Her sister's wedding was an expense, and they expect her to take her place as the eldest daughter now. To console her for that loss, they allow her to visit Lucille, and then travel on to Italy. Neither young woman finds the answers she seeks in Italy, though they find much to delight them particularly in Venice. Instead, it is in Ireland, in the midst of great trouble, that a way is opened first for Fanny and then for Lucille.

As always with Kate O'Brien's books, I found myself reading this slowly, to savor it. There were one or two places in the first chapter where I was reading slowly because I was somewhat lost in the language. The descriptions of the inner life of Fanny's mother Julia in particular reminded me of reading Henry James, where I know the words are in English but the sense of them eludes me. But either my reading eye (ear) became acclimated or the prose became clearer, because the story then flowed easily.  We see most of the events through Fanny's eyes, though the point of view sometimes switches to Lucille, and later to Fanny's Aunt Eleanor. She lives on the small family estate in the west of Ireland, which she stayed to run for her elderly father, and to care for him, after her sister married. It is still "home" to Julia, who returns there as often as she can, bringing her own children.

I have to mention two other characters who delighted me, in different ways. First is Lucille's mother, the Comtesse de Mellin, who takes the young women to Italy. She is rather scatter-brained and indolent, a bit like Lady Bertram (though much brighter). She is also a loving mother who wants her children to be happy. Personally, she finds Venice unsightly and full of disagreeable smells, but she won't deprive her children or her guest of their delight. The second is Mère Générale, Mother Cathérine Mandel of the Compagnie de la Sainte Famille.  As soon as I read that Fanny had returned from her school in Place des Ormes in Brussels, I realized that this was the same school and the same order featured in O'Brien's The Land of Spices. I did hope we were going to meet Mother Mary Helen from that book again, but no. Instead, we get Mother Cathérine, whom we know only by letter and memory in the earlier book. Here she is a wise counselor and friend, and a woman of faith, like Aunt Eleanor (who with Fanny's mother also studied at Place des Ormes). Though Mother Cathérine and Aunt Eleanor want to help these young women find their way, they know they cannot fight the battles for them.

In the end, a door has opened for both young women, but we leave them on the threshold. I very much want to know what happens next.  I have been plotting out different stories for them ever since I finished reading, while wondering if I might meet them again in one of Kate O'Brien's other books. I have several still to read, and others that I read so long ago I've forgotten them (particularly The Last of Summer and The Ante-Room). I do think that Kate O'Brien is a marvelous writer. It's a shame that so many of her books are out of print and hard to find, despite the Virago reprints in the 1980s.

N.B. I feel I should have noted that this book was published in 1953.

A guided tour through Spain

Farewell Spain, Kate O'Brien

I bought this book many years ago, when I first discovered Kate O'Brien's books, and then let it sit on the TBR pile.  When I finally read O'Brien's Mary Lavelle last year, the Spanish setting was so vivid, so much a part of the story, that I could hardly wait to explore it again in Farewell Spain.

This is a complex book, with many layers, not simply the travelogue that I was expecting.  Written during the winter of 1936-1937, it is also a passionate protest against the ravages of the Spanish Civil War, and an elegy for the Spain that she knows and loves.  She fears not just the disappearance of that Spain, but also of Europe itself, through war, and even more war's aftermath, accelerating a drive toward uniformity:

     "If European society survives its next crisis, if science, having destroyed us, permits or maybe compels us to live again, it is to a very new sort of life that these races will be beckoned back . . .
   "The woes and beauties wrought hitherto upon the map by differences of language, faith and climate will be no longer worth consideration for - even if they are still potential - they will be controlled, patrolled by science, the international dictator, which in any case, by air-travel, radio and television will have made all possible novelties into boring fireside matters-of-fact . . .
     "Meanwhile we wait for our old, shaggy, warted world to go off in its last fit. And we count our ill-starred blessings - the junk we have accumulated and so obstinately loved and sought to increase. Temples, palaces, cathedrals; libraries full of moonshine, pictures to proclaim dead persons, quaint legends, quainter personal conceptions . . ."

Farewell Spain is her protest, her defiance, her theses nailed to the door for all to see.  But it is not an angry book, or a sad one (though there are moments of both).  "I write as a sentimental traveller," she says, but she is never that.  And since this is Kate O'Brien, it is a beautifully written and wonderfully readable book.

O'Brien takes the reader on a tour of northern Spain, along the Costa Verde all the way to Compostela, before heading south to Avila and Madrid.  She then travels north again, ending up in Bilboa, where she herself worked as an Irish "miss" and found the inspiration for Mary Lavelle's similar experiences.  Rather than a straight-forward narrative of one trip, O'Brien weaves together memories from different visits over the years.  Reading this I was reminded again how little I know of the geography of Spain.  I kept an atlas open while I read, and I frequently resorted to Google maps to locate the towns she mentions.  O'Brien also frequently refers to Spanish history and literature, and while I recognized some of the names, most of the references went over my head.  One exception was the chapter on Teresa of Avila, whom O'Brien claims as a feminist and "the greatest woman in Christian history."  I have read her Autobiography, and completely failed to understand her great work on mysticism, The Way of Perfection.  But O'Brien's frequent quotes from her letters make me think I need to look for those soon, as well as O'Brien's own monograph on this first woman Doctor of the Church.

I also have to admit myself shamefully ignorant about the Spanish Civil War, the shadow of which hangs over this book.  "As I write [in the first chapter] Irun is burning . . . The café on the corner is a heap of broken stones. A few men stand dejectedly about with guns."  O'Brien, though a proclaimed pacifist, is firmly on the side of the Republicans in the struggle against Franco and fascism.  She links this civil war to the American one: "But at least a war waged on the clear insistence - that government of the people by the people for the people shall not perish from the earth is one very impressive if horrible way of saying something which must never, never be denied . . ."  Franco's government reacted to this open partisanship by barring her from Spain for twenty years.

I was glad to learn from the Introduction that, after the ban was lifted, O'Brien returned many times to Spain before her death in 1974.  If I am ever lucky enough to travel there, this book will be the first thing I pack.

In the parlour with the aunts

Presentation Parlour, Kate O'Brien

With my rediscovery of Kate O'Brien, I started looking at the books of hers that I haven't read yet.  Presentation Parlour immediately caught my eye, because it was described as an autobiography and because the title reminded me of the convent setting of The Land of Spices, my favorite of her books.  Presentation Parlour was originally published in 1963, when Kate O'Brien was 66 years old.  When the book arrived, I was surprised to find it so short, less than 120 pages, which suggested a very brief account of her life.  As it turns out, this isn't really an autobiography, more a biography of a family.

One of nine children, Kate O'Brien was 5 years old when her mother died.  Her characters are often orphaned at a young age, or separated from their mothers.  Her five aunts, from both sides of the family, helped her father raise his large family.  This book tells the stories of their lives and their place in the children's lives. O'Brien writes in her Introduction that "our father, and we with him, became more than is usual dependent upon the five - for authority, fun, advice, or affection. And we would have been a lost and queer bundle of orphans without them. Anyway, they were there."

Three of the aunts were her mother's sisters.  O'Brien uses the first chapter, on her Aunt Annie, to explore the history of her mother's family, and I could see how she drew on that history in her first published novel, Without My Cloak.  The other two maternal aunts were nuns, members of a strictly enclosed order whose convent was in Limerick, where the family lived.  Visits to their convent were a regular part of the children's life, and the convent's parlours became a center of family life.  Holidays like Christmas were celebrated in the parlours, so the aunts could join in.  These visits kept the aunts in touch with the family's life, so they could advise and interfere.  They also gave the family a front row seat to watch the community's life unfold.  O'Brien herself was educated in a convent boarding school, and this with the experience that she had of her aunts' vocations must have shaped the setting and story of The Land of Spices.

The chapters on Aunt Fan (Sister Clare) and Aunt Mary (Mother Margaret Mary) brought back my own memories of parlor visits.  When we stayed with my grandmother in the small Idaho town where my mother grew up, just up the road was the Benedictine monastery where her sister, my great-aunt, was a nun.  We never missed a visit, sitting in the visitors' parlor until we kids got restless and went out (or were sent out) to play in the grounds.

O'Brien spends less time on her last two aunts, her father's sister and sister-in-law, who joined in the family celebrations in the convent but were otherwise less involved in their lives.  It was her father's sister-in-law, Auntie Mick, who was the first of the five to die, and in a final chapter O'Brien brings each of the aunts' stories to its end.  She writes, "So there they pass, my aunts. No one but I will care about their 'short and simple annals,'" yet short as the annals are, she made these women real to me, though she herself says, "And for all my searching back, for all my will to reach them, I have not found the very heart of any one of them."

This book was not what I expected, yet I enjoyed its portrait of life in Ireland in the late 1800s and early 1900s, its exploration of religious life and vocation, and its affectionate pictures of five very different women, as well as the glimpses it gives into the roots of Kate O'Brien's novels.

An Irish "miss" in Spain

Mary Lavelle, Kate O'Brien

I discovered Kate O'Brien's books over twenty years ago.  The first that I read, The Land of Spices, is still one of my favorite books, and it was also the first Virago edition I ever bought.  As I usually do, I then collected every book of hers I could find.  But I never got around to reading Mary Lavelle, which I vaguely thought was a sequel of sorts to The Land of Spices.  Reading the reviews of Kate O'Brien over at Verity's Virago Venture sent me to the TBR shelves in search of it, and I have spent the past several days lost in the story.

I very quickly realized my mistake: this isn't a sequel to The Land of Spices.  As the book opens, it is 1922 and the title character, Mary Lavelle, is traveling from her home in Ireland to take up a position in Spain as a "miss," a combination of governess and chaperone.  Like Mary, most of the "misses" in Catholic Spain are Irish Catholics.  Unlike the other "misses" she meets, though, Mary has not come to Spain to make a career.  She is engaged to a young man in her home town, John, but they cannot afford to marry yet.  Rather than simply living in her father's house, waiting for her wedding, she seizes a chance to do something different:

"To go to Spain. To be alone for a little space, a tiny hiatus between her life's two accepted phases. To cease being a daughter without immediately becoming a wife. To be a free lance, to belong to no one place or family or person - to achieve that silly longing of childhood, only for one year, before she flung it with all other childish things upon the scrapheap. Spain!"

Determined not to let this opportunity slip from her hands, Mary overcomes John's opposition and her father's indifference.  She takes her place as "miss" to the three daughters of the Areagava family, prominent citizens of the town of Cabantes on Spain's northern coast.  At 21, she is only a few years older than the eldest, Pilár, but it is the youngest, 14-year-old Milagros, with whom she bonds most deeply.  In addition to their parents, the family also includes a son, Juanito, who lives in Madrid with his wife and baby son.  When Mary meets this second "John" they are immediately and irresistably drawn to each other.  Mary also meets her fellow "misses," most of whom are loud in their complaints about Spain itself and their employers, but they lack the resources, financial or mental, to find other work or to return home.  They cannot understand Mary's contentment, her growing attachment to Spain and to the people she meets.

Mary is a very sympathetic character, and it is fascinating to watch her metamorphosis in this coming-of-age story.  O'Brien delves deep into the hearts and minds of her characters, switching her point of view between Mary and other characters, particularly Juanito and his father Don Pablo.  Her language is elegant and yet easy, it never strains for effect.  The story is so rich in emotion and character that I found myself putting it down at the end of almost every chapter, to savor it and to consider what had happened before reading on.  This was not a book to be rushed through.

Like The Land of Spices, this book was banned in Ireland at publication, in part because of its frank sexuality (though not explict in today's terms), including sympathetic treatment of a gay character.  And while all of the characters are practicing Catholics and people of faith, they struggle with their own beliefs, with living their faith, and even with the Church itself, which may also have been a factor in the ban.  The strongly Catholic setting, richly evoked, was a pleasant change from the constant, almost reflexive anti-Catholicism that I have come across lately in so many 19th century English novels and letters.

I also have on the TBR pile O'Brien's Farewell Spain, about her own experiences of the country, including a year's stint herself as a "miss."  Looking at the author's note in this book, I see several other of her books that I haven't read, including an autobiography and a book about Ireland.  I am so glad to have re-discovered Kate O'Brien - on my own shelves, no less!