Questions of propriety
Would it be appropriate and acceptable to include an Irish woman writer in a group of women writers of c. 1930s described as 'British women writers'? The writer in question, Kate O'Brien, lived in England for most of her adult life, was published by English publishers (and several of her books were Banned In The Free State for immoral tendencies), spent her time in London literary circles, did work for the BBC, was elected to the Royal Society of Literature and appears in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. But is it imperialist appropriation to count her as a British woman writer of the period?
Am just reading excellent bio of O'Brien, but is it just me, or do people generally have no idea about the state of the British divorce laws and attitudes towards divorce of the period?
I.e. O'Brien married in 1923 and the marriage lasted rather less than a year, although she seems to have remained on good terms with her husband (who appears to be have been somewhere around the middle of the Kinsey scale, in that he did remarry but also had a long-standing relationship with a male 'soul-mate'). They did not divorce until 1938.
Hi! newsflash! Lesbian relations did not count as a matrimonial offence, and from 1923-1937 the only grounds for divorce was adultery!
While the protocol was that a gentleman was supposed to provide evidence (real or spurious) of being an adulterous swine so that his wife could divorce him as the innocent offended-against party: -
I don't think this was going to happen when the wife, although lapsed herself, took a fair amount of effort to remain on good terms with her family in Ireland (which included nun aunts and a brother-in-law who was active Catholic layman and generally onside with De Valera's views). No way was she going to initiate a divorce.
However, following the Herbert Act of 1937, her husband could quite feasibly divorce her for desertion, and it looks as though the action, if not exactly collusive, was undefended.
I don't think it's all that difficult to ascertain all this, but maybe I underestimate the difficulty.
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