Biography: Really, Kate O'Brien should not have been a particularly good novelist. Her preoccupations could be said to be narrow and were continually recycled. Bent on idealising her middle-class Limerick background and the milieu she came from, she had propagandist tendencies.
She was almost devoid of the illuminating qualities of humour and irony. She could be careless or even unimaginative - in The Ante Room, set in 1880 to defuse controversy, the characters speak and act in the manner of the 1920s, when it was written. And her ear for cadence and rhythm was not the best - her sentence construction is often clumsy and clotted.
Yet she is a deeply impressive and satisfying writer. One reads her, not exactly with pleasure perhaps, but at the least with an invigorating sense of connection with a subtle and liberated mind - which is arguably what literature is ultimately for.
Indeed, she's so daringly sophisticated that one wonders whether she suffered - or enjoyed? - the same notoriety that her namesake, Edna, did a few decades later. But this is one of the questions that Eibhear Walshe, in this welcome but exasperatingly all-too-short biography, does not deal with in any depth. O'Brien's best book, The Land Of Spices, was banned in the 1940s because of a reference to homosexual love, but so were hundreds of others, both here and abroad. Perhaps the pervasive Catholicism in her novels made them more acceptable, though she was not a Catholic writer. To her characters, Catholicism is a recourse rather than a solution in their moral struggles, and their actions are not modified by its strictures. But it is the climate in which they move and are easy with.
This is unsurprising, as she was more or less brought up by nuns, sent at the age of five to board in Laurel Hill Convent in Limerick when her mother died. Her O'Brien grandfather had been a poor tenant farmer in Kilfinane who, when he was evicted in 1852, came into Limerick and found wealth and station as a horse-trader to the army and gentry; part of "the imperial economy". Born in 1897, 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.
O'Brien was to fly by those nets as by so many others. Her identity was fluid and restless, reflected in the curious indeterminacy of time and place in her novels. They could be happening almost anywhere or whenever, say in the pre-1950s. Some reviewers used to complain that their Irish locale simply wasn't believable.
She was very proud of her family's money-making talents and middle-class civilities, and always remained close to them, though her young women characters usually find this milieu stifling and seek to escape. In the same way, she admired the Catholic aesthetic but was unburdened by its rules.
AFTER LEAVING UCD in 1919, she set up as an intellectual in London, writing for the Guardian and other journals before rapidly finding success and some wealth as a novelist. In her 20s she was briefly married to a man even more déclassé and dépaysé than herself, a Dutch writer called Gustaaf Rheiner. Walshe tells us that the homosexual Henry Archer in The Land Of Spices is very similar to Rheiner as he reveals himself in his autobiography, but, disappointingly, he quotes no relevant passages.
After the marriage ended - Rheiner was bisexual but was also "unpleasant", according to Walshe - Kate may have given birth to a son. Walshe's investigations on this subject are again not what you could call exhaustive. He repeats the rumours that a boy, Peter, adopted by her sister, Nance, was actually Kate's, but gives no evidence either way. Her later relationship with Peter, for instance, is not discussed.
But provincial decorum and discretion has always surrounded Kate O'Brien's reputation for some reason, more than it has other writers'. One commentator has said that the words "lesbian writer" were first used to describe her (by Emma Donoghue at a Kate O'Brien weekend) little more than a decade ago, due to family sensitivities. Eibhear Walshe goes along with this view of her sexual orientation, though he offers no conclusive evidence. She never seems to have "come out" - understandably enough - or if she did we aren't told.
However, her determined - and fetching - butch poses, especially when she was finding her feet in London in the 1920s, and her very close relationships with women, including writer Enid Starkie, are conclusive enough. And, of course, the importance of one woman to another is an insistent theme in her fictions.
But it has to be said that the inclusion of letters from a probable lover or two would have been helpful here. Walshe quotes few letters on any subject, though often, tantalisingly, he tells us what they suggest to him.
In her heyday, Kate O'Brien had remarkable success, both critical and financial. But she spent her money well, if not wisely, and spent her last years as a charge on her sister, Nance, creatively washed up and drinking too much. She survived into the 1970s, a decade that seems too uncivil and banal for her to live in.
This, the first biography of her to appear, is both welcome and valuable, not least because Eibhear Walshe writes with a lucid readability which is not that common in biographers, and has interesting things to say. But why did it have to be so frugal?
Anne Haverty's new novel, The Free and Easy, is published this month by Chatto & Windus
Kate O'Brien: A Writing Life By Eibhear Walshe Irish Academic Press, 194pp. NPG