“Travels of memory, imagination and fact” : Kate O’Brien’s archival notes

This essay explores Kate O’Brien’s attitude towards autobiographical narrative and her quest for self-articulation. It argues that the repeated abstinence from the writing of her autobiography becomes a dominant trope in much of her late-life writing, much of which currently remains unpublished and/or uncollected. By analysing O’Brien’s archival material alongside her published non-fiction prose, significant insights into O’Brien’s thinking on the processes of memory, as well as her somewhat pained and contradictory relationship with the self and its expression, are brought to light. O’Brien’s Farewell Spain (1937), Teresa of Avila (1951), My Ireland (1962), and Presentation Parlour (1963) all establish a mode of self-articulation through the relationship of the self with place (Spain), and person (her female relations and forebears). As such, this essay argues that these texts form a series of carefully averted auto/biographies and further utilises archive theory to offer a framework through which O’Brien’s autobiographical impulse can be understood. Within this theoretical paradigm, O’Brien’s quest for self-articulation finally becomes a desire to capture the anticipation of memory, opposed to direct recollection, and to seek out literary forms within which to express those memories.