Two new RTÉ Radio 1 Davis Now Lectures podcasts are reminders of the reward of listening to what has been put on the record on a subject at a particular time, and the relationship of a contributor to that subject.
The 1997 Thomas Davis Lectures series was titled Kate O’Brien: The Woman and the Writer and produced in the birth-centenary year of the Limerick-born writer by Seamus Hosey. Some of the contributors to the series - literature professor Lorna Reynolds and poet Eavan Boland, for example - and whose talks are now available as podcasts, had met or personally known author Kate O’Brien (1897-1974).
We need your consent to load this rte-player contentWe use rte-player to manage extra content that can set cookies on your device and collect data about your activity. Please review their details and accept them to load the content.Manage Preferences
Listen: Poet Eavan Boland on writer Kate O'Brien
As Eavan Boland says in her lecture: ‘The Living memory of a writer is one of the real gifts which one generation can offer to the next. It’s the gift the present makes to the future, after all, that’s the way we add substance to style and accuracy to our reading. But it isn’t an unambiguous gift. If it was, I wouldn’t feel as hesitant as I do about my attempts to remember and locate Kate O’Brien in this [lecture]...’
Perhaps today, it is Boland’s gradual realisation along the years of how her appreciation of Kate O’Brien grew which strikes most, and how the value of what sticks sometimes takes hold slowly over time.
She tells us that it was, in fact, Kate O’Brien’s Presentation Parlour, a collection of reminiscences of her early family life, and other books of O’Brien’s that she kept close at hand as sustenance during those early days of having as a young woman moved with her husband into their new suburban house, their home for the rest of their shared life. Boland was still in the early days of her own writing life when Kate O’Brien in the final years of hers, came to dinner.
We need your consent to load this rte-player contentWe use rte-player to manage extra content that can set cookies on your device and collect data about your activity. Please review their details and accept them to load the content.Manage Preferences
Listen: Professor Emeritus Lorna Reynolds on writer Kate O'Brien
Lorna Reynolds, by the time of her contribution to the 1997 lecture series, was Professor Emeritus of Modern English at University College Galway, already having written the critical biography Kate O’Brien: A Literary Portrait.
Reynolds recounts how as a young woman she first met Kate O’Brien, who became a life-long friend. O’Brien was the guest at The Women Writers Club annual dinner in Dublin in 1946, and it fell to a young Lorna Reynolds to do the introductory honours. Reynolds opens her lecture declaring how O’Brien is ‘a star who sank for a while below the horizon, and when her time came rose again’. But she is keen also to point out that her personal memory of Kate O’Brien, such as it is full of wit and charm and honesty would only be of personal value to her, had O’Brien not been such an accomplished writer.
Find out more about Kate O’Brien here. A new RTÉ Radio 1 Davis Now Podcast podcast is released regularly; you can hear more on a host of subjects and subscribe here.
