Lorna Reynolds

Brought up a Catholic , KOBlost her faith while still at school; however, even without intellectual belief, she retained a strong emotional attachment to the religion of her forebears. Lorna Reynolds calls her a...

During her time at Oxford, KOB developed friendships with the Irishwoman Enid Starkie (a French scholar of note and later the holder of the Légion d'Honneur) and the English novelist E. M. Delafield . The...

Lorna Reynolds and Eavan Boland liken this novel to the work of John Galsworthy , as it is the saga of several generations of an Irish family building a business and growing in wealth.

It was widely and enthusiastically reviewed. Biographer Lorna Reynolds says KOB , like Byron , awoke one day to find herself famous.

Lorna Reynolds reads this as a charming novel, but one that does not break new ground in KOB 's development. Its sales, compared with those of earlier works, were disappointing.

Nonetheless, it was the opinion of Lorna Reynolds (who heard KOB read these chapters aloud) that she had not lost her touch.

Lorna Reynolds calls this book highly selective and idiosyncratic.

In 1960 KOB moved back to England: to Boughton, near Faversham in Kent (within reach of Canterbury). She had no sense of being an exile in England, her biographer Lorna Reynolds insists.

This book (again set in Mellick, a fictionalised Limerick) highlights the puritanical moral complacency of Irish society. Lorna Reynolds sees it as a response to the banning of Mary Lavelle; she judges the...

As in O'Brien's other novels, many topics are on the table. Both the insular and the cosmopolitan strands in Irish culture are examined. Again, Lorna Reynolds feels that this novel sprang from the banning of...

She was, says her biographer Lorna Reynolds , a born traveller.