Born: 26 December 1916, Ireland
Died: 21 July 1994
Country most active: Ireland
Also known as: NA
This biography is republished from The Dictionary of Irish Biography and was written by Patrick O’Donovan. Shared by permission in line with Creative Commons ‘Attribution’ (CC BY) licencing.
O’Flaherty, Kathleen Mary Josephine (1916–94), French scholar, was born 26 December 1916 in Mayfield House, Lymington Road, Enniscorthy, Co. Wexford, the youngest of the four children, two sons and two daughters, of Bernard Joseph O’Flaherty (1864/5−1929), a prominent and well-to-do solicitor, and his wife, Frances Mary (née Lewis, 1880−1952), the Dublin-born daughter of a civil servant. By her own account, O’Flaherty was an unanticipated addition to the family following the accidental death of her sister Annie on the eve of her third birthday.
She received her secondary education in the Ursuline convent, St Mary’s, Waterford, and, following an independent year of study at the Université Catholique de Lille, entered University College Cork (UCC) in 1935, where she was to remain as student and teacher until her retirement in 1982. She graduated in 1938 with first-class honours in English and French (BA) and, having won the Peel memorial prize and the French government medal (being the first graduate to be awarded the latter), obtained an MA for a dissertation on A. E. Housman written under the supervision of Daniel Corkery in 1939. She was awarded a travelling studentship by the National University of Ireland (NUI) in 1941, but the war prevented her from taking up this award abroad. O’Flaherty obtained a Ph.D. from the NUI in 1943 for a dissertation on Chateaubriand, which ran to 900 foolscap pages. One of her companions in her postgraduate studies was Máire MacSwiney Brugha, to whom she was Caitlín. On the day when both scholars were awaiting the outcome of the travelling studentship examination in Merrion Square, MacSwiney Brugha recalls that O’Flaherty absented herself for a time to visit her brother Peadar, then imprisoned in Mountjoy. Like him, O’Flaherty had republican leanings not shared by the rest of their family. MacSwiney Brugha also won a studentship and on O’Flaherty’s return joined in celebrations over sherry in the Russell Hotel. In their estimable academic ventures, both could look to the example of pioneering women members of staff in UCC, notably Mary Ryan, professor of Romance languages, Mary Boyle, professor of German, and Ethna Byrne-Costigan, Ryan’s successor. Following her first appointment to a part-time lecturing post in 1943, O’Flaherty also taught for a time in Scoil Íte, the school founded in Cork in 1916 by MacSwiney Brugha’s aunts, Mary MacSwiney and her sister Annie.
These years were, then, a period of intense and formative activity. She maintained a rapid rate of production with the publication of her first two books, Voltaire: myth and reality (1945) and Paul Claudel and ‘The tidings brought to Mary’ (1948), both written at the prompting of Alfred O’Rahilly. From 1945 to 1953 she was assistant editor at Cork University Press, where she worked closely with O’Rahilly, by then president of UCC, to whom she also acted as assistant and who was a strong influence on her thinking at this stage in her career; she published on a wide range of topics of French interest in several catholic journals, including Blackfriars and Studies. From this time, O’Flaherty shared a home with a fellow lecturer in French, Yvonne Servais (1904–94). Theirs was an especially close personal as well as academic friendship, with each of these dimensions sustaining the other over many decades. Thus they collaborated in fashioning undergraduate and postgraduate programmes, deeply informed by the most prestigious French models. Generations of students were in turn trained in the discipline of precise and careful textual analysis and the judicious appreciation not only of classical French literature but, increasingly in later years, of modern and contemporary writing. In their later published work, each acknowledged the fruits of their ‘longue amitié’ (as they termed it) and their practical as well as intellectual debts to the other, not least when it came to the correction of proofs.
O’Flaherty was appointed lecturer in 1954 and then to a readership in 1968, before becoming professor of French in 1970. She was a figure of authority: the wide circle of those with whom she came into contact throughout the college and beyond regarded her with respect, some awe, and – on occasion – acute apprehension; yet her dealings with students and colleagues alike were characterised by generosity and humour on her part. Her appointment to the chair coincided with a renewal and a shift in direction in her writing, the fruit of years of intensive reading. Published in 1973, The novel in France: 1945–1965 points to a sustained concern in her mature teaching and writing with the value of literature in an era of formidable doubt; the novel in particular emerges as a form by means of which we endeavour ‘to reach hope through despair’, through the struggle to attain a disabused awareness of ourselves (O’Flaherty, 18). This book, whose exactitude and acuity belie its claim merely to be a general survey, characteristically closes with an extended meditation on why we read literature.
O’Flaherty and Servais went to Paris several times a year where they would make a point of seeing as many new plays as possible; they collected an excellent library which they bequeathed to UCC. They had a house in Rosscarbery, Co. Cork, where O’Flaherty swam in the sea in winter and summer. She was created a chevalier in the Ordre national du Mérite by the French government in 1972. After retirement, she returned to Chateaubriand. Her final work, Pessimisme de Chateaubriand (1989), showed how his ‘tristesse décorative’ was often nothing more than a characteristic pose, displaying this key dimension of his writing in all its complexity and its dynamism. Following Servais’s death after a brief illness in June of that year, Kathleen O’Flaherty, who had been unwell for some time, died 21 July 1994 in the Bon Secours Hospital, Cork.