The Last of Summer

by Kate O'Brien

It is 1939, the last summer before the outbreak of war. French actress Angele Maury abandons a group of friends travelling through Ireland and takes herself to picturesque Drumaninch, birthplace of her dead father. She has come to make sense of her past. Self-conscious with her pale, exotic beauty, Angele braves the idiosyncratic world of the Kernahans: her enigmatic aunt Hannah, her ridiculous but loveable uncle Corney and her three cousins - Martin, charming, intense; Tom, devoted to his mother, and their bright sister Jo, who combines religious faith with a penchant for gambling. But is there some mystery surrounding the past? History threatens to repeat itself as Angele finds herself seduced by the beauty of Ireland, and by the love of two men...First published in 1943, The Last of the Summer is a perfectly structured psychological love story.

Genres: Ireland, Fiction, Irish Literature, Literary Fiction, Historical Fiction, Classics, World War II

269 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 1943

About the author

Kathleen Mary Louise "Kate" O'Brien, was an Irish novelist and playwright.

After the success of her play, Distinguished Villa in 1926, she took to full-time writing and was awarded the 1931 James Tait Black Prize for her novel Without My Cloak. She is best known for her 1934 novel The Ante-Room, her 1941 novel The Land of Spices and the 1946 novel That Lady. Many of her books dealt with issues of female sexuality — with several exploring gay/lesbian themes — and both Mary Lavelle and The Land of Spices were banned in Ireland. She also wrote travel books, or rather accounts of places and experiences, on both Ireland and Spain, a country she loved, and which features in a number of her novels. She lived much of her later life in England and died in Canterbury in 1974; she is buried in Faversham Cemetery.

The Glucksman Library at the University of Limerick currently holds a large collection of O'Brien's personal writings. In August 2005, Penguin reissued her final novel, As Music and Splendour (1958), which had been out of print for decades. The Kate O'Brien weekend, which takes place in Limerick, attracts a large number of people, both academic and non-academic.

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.

Reviews

[Sara]

Angele Maury, a French actress traveling with friends through Ireland, decides to take a side trip to the town of Drumaninch and meet her dead father’s family, the Kernahans. The year is 1939, and the world is feeling the tensions of Europe on the fringe of war. There was obviously a rift in the family when her father left Ireland, and the past seems to loom over the present with secrets and resentments that Angele is completely unaware of.

Among those Angele meets in Ireland are her two male cousins, Martin and Tom, her female cousin, Jo, and the very bitchy and cruel Aunt Hannah. Both of the men are drawn to their new cousin and we know almost immediately that there is going to be trouble in paradise. That Hannah rules her family is obvious, and that she despises the presence of her niece just as apparent to the reader, if not to the other characters involved.

I found the rapidity of the relationships formed to be a bit disconcerting, but this is a different time than now, and in the context of life of the time and the looming threat of war that hovers over the world, perhaps love is easier to fall into, if no easier to comprehend. At least O’Brien resisted making the relationships easy or uncomplicated and left the characters with the same doubts the reader entertained.

Love can survive, a little or a long time, this lesson of its insufficiency--because it must, because self-love and self-respect insist; because pleasure is strong, and compromise is an understood necessity, and because lovers learn to understand love cynically and yet value it.

How much do these individual lives, personal problems, torn hearts and hurts matter against the backdrop of the war that is coming? Will any of these people survive to see the end of the war? Will they look back on this summer of angst and wonder if they had not given it more meaning than it should have carried, or perhaps wishing that they had been a bit kinder and more accepting of one another and embraced the simple lives they enjoyed? All questions I was left with at the end of the novel and ones that I think would have been in the minds of many people at the time this novel was written.

[JimZ]

I didn’t like this novel by Kate O’Brien all that much. The main man in the novel, Tom, spent an afternoon with a young woman, Angele, along with a bunch of other people (they went on a picnic)....and at the end he declared his love to her, and she declared her love for him, and was willing to throw away her acting career, which was just taking off and a vocation which she enjoyed, and to live on a farm with him and bear his children. Like, what the hell??? No preliminary dating for them I guess!!! Yeesh!!! And I’m supposed to believe this?

Some parts of the novel were OK but I don’t know...usually I am rooting for two people who love one another to triumph over a person or persons who are trying to stand in their way and sully the relationship, but in this case I thought there engagement was way too premature (first date includes marriage proposal which is eagerly accepted)... Not that I was rooting for the mother of Tom, Hannah, who wanted him all to herself...talk about a mama’s boy!

O’Brien did not do a good job, I felt, of introducing us to the back story, or of introducing us to characters in the novel and explaining who they were when first introduced.

Synopsis from back of the cover of the Virago Modern Classics re-issue:
• It is 1939, the last summer before the outbreak of war. Travelling through Ireland, French actress Angele Maury abandons her group of friends and takes herself instead to picturesque Drumaninch, the birthplace of her dead father. She has come to make sense of her past, and is soon absorbed into the strange, idiosyncratic world of her cousins, the Kernahans. Self-conscious with her pale, exotic beauty, Angele finds herself seduced first by the beauty of Ireland and then by the love of two men, as history threatens to repeat itself in a perfectly structured psychological love story.

I had previously read ‘Mary Lavelle’ (4.5 stars) and ‘The Land of Spices’ (4 stars) from O’Brien and quite liked them and hence why I wanted to read more of her oeuvre. This book of hers did not work for me, however. C’est la vie.

Reviews:
• https://heavenali.wordpress.com/2020/...
• https://danitorres.typepad.com/workin...
• here’s two journal articles that discuss the novel: No ‘Help to the Imagination’: Kate O'Brien and the Emergency (Author: Anna Teekell) Irish University Review, 2018, Volume 48 Issue 1, Page 97-112, ISSN 0021-1427 & The Devil Era’ (Author: Anthony Roche) Irish University Review, 2018, Volume 48 Issue 1, Special Issue: Kate O’Brien (Spring/Summer 2018), pp. 113-126. (The whole issue from this journal is on Kate O’Brien)

[Marija]

The best part of this book is the fact that Kate O’Brien allows the reader to feel sympathy towards these characters. Every character in this story is an emotional mess...every thought and feeling is an absolute. No one ever feels by halves. In some ways it’s tragic witnessing these characters deal with life and circumstance, especially when it’s immediately apparent that each character will be forced to go through some form of sacrifice, even the bitchy, overbearing matriarch Hannah.

I felt most attached to the poor child-like innocence of Tom, who was forced to become an adult at a young age, in effect losing his chance to really live. When a chance of escape appears, is it possible to take it, when in the process it’s very possible to lose everything that once was held so dear? Timing is important in regards to change....

The sacrifices for Jo and her brother Martin are more selfish in nature...using the excuse of “time” as a means to go forward with other plans. Especially in regards to Jo, the reason for self-denial is extreme, and one that I didn’t especially like. On the other hand, Martin’s is more psychologically interesting...a way for him to be closer to his one true desire.

Angelè, even though she’s the protagonist, serves more as a catalyst in this story. Her presence drives the story on and in some ways helps time to bring about change, even though in some ways, time does change her.

And then there’s Hannah. She’s the kind of woman who knowingly ignores everything around her, pretending she doesn’t know when she does, unless it happens to pertain to her number one son, Tom. I honestly don’t like her. Yet I liked how O’Brien portrayed her at the end. O’Brien allows the reader to ask the question, “Does she really get everything she wants?” I loved what Angelè says to Hannah at the end, as well as how that whole scene plays out. It’s good.

[Jared Iseler]

Train Book #7: No❤️

[Danielle]

My reading is much like a pendulum swinging back and forth between genres, specific country settings, authors and especially particular eras. I tend to be pretty firmly settled in the interwar period, however, with brief forays here and there elsewhere. The pendulum is beginning to swing now to World War II after quite a while concentrating on the First World War. No doubt that's in part thanks to Kate O'Brien's quietly elegant The Last of Summer, set in Ireland in the days leading up to England's entry into WWII.

Perhaps Kate O'Brien is read more than I think, though I don't often see mentions of her books online. She wrote nine novels and a number of plays, and happily a small handful of them are still in print and readily available. I'm not quite sure what made me add The Last of Summer to my list of books to read this year (first one to cross off the list by the way). Maybe it was the promise of "a perfectly structured psychological love story", and the desire to read something set in Ireland. Whatever the impetus, I'm quite pleased to have rediscovered Kate O'Brien. I read Mary Lavelle in my pre-blogging days, too long ago to recall it clearly, but I obviously had a good experience or I wouldn't have continued collecting her work. It's just taken me a while to get back to her, but I'm glad I did, however random this choice was for inclusion on my list. O'Brien's strength as a writer, aside from her clear, crisp prose is the insight into the characters she writes about, which she does very adroitly.

The story takes place over the course of only one week. Into the ordered lives of the Kernahan family steps Angèle Maury, the French cousin none of them knew about. Angèle is an actress touring Ireland with friends when she decides to set off on her own path and visit the place of her father's birth. Tom Kernahan left Waterpark House many years ago and married a French actress of the Comédie Française. There's a mystery surrounding his departure, a broken heart and failed relationship, and after his somewhat scandalous marriage to an actress he was not mentioned again.

Uncertain of the reception she'll receive Angèle finds her aunt Hannah a most gracious hostess and it's a full house at which she arrives. But while on the surface all is pristine and calm, emotions are going to be stirred and personalities upset only to be further unsettled by week's end. Even though Ireland will remain a neutral country nearly everyone will be affected by the call to war in one way or another.

Angèle falls in comfortably well with her cousins, she being much the same age and temperament as the three; Tom, Martin and Jo. Tom, as the eldest son, has had to take over the running of Waterpark after the early death of his father. Both Martin and Jo continued their studies abroad while Tom returned to responsibilities that take up much of his time leaving little left over for relationships of a romantic nature. He has a close relationship with his mother, and she dotes on him, perhaps too much so, though it's not had an ill effect on his character. If anything he is more loyal and responsible to his family. Martin has plans to return to Paris and his studies, and to the displeasure of her family Jo wants to enter the Convent. No matter that the Kernahans are Catholic, they'd prefer she chose some other path in life.

Although beautiful and vivacious Angèle is not fast or improper even though she is dedicated to the theater and leads a more bohemian lifestyle than that which is lived at Waterpark. From the first Martin is smitten with her and in his own quiet way, so too is Tom. While Angèle believes she will never marry, too caught up in her art, she understands she is falling for Tom. It's a conflicted love, however, as the love is she believes, just 'good enough'. But is it quite enough to survive the struggle for which their impending marriage will create when they declare it to Hannah and the rest of the family? For Hannah has other ideas for Tom's future and which bride he might choose. More importantly she depends on Tom even to the point of possessiveness. And so it is a battle between, what is termed in the introduction, two kinds of passion.

Being first cousins it's frowned upon in the Church for them to marry and they will require a special dispensation to do so. With the declaration of war an almost certainty the pressure to marry quickly in order for Angèle to return to France to check on her family one last time before settling down at Waterpark and Hannah's manipulations against the pair, however benign they may seem, means the pair is placed in an impossible situation.

I'm very impressed by this story and from what I've read it's not even considered her best, though very good indeed. Despite Hannah's meddlesome ways, she's not a villain, though certainly at times maddening. O'Brien's characters are complex and very human and easy to imagine them as living and breathing individuals. I'll definitely be returning to her work.

[Carol]

This quiet yet wonderful novel takes place in Ireland at the end of the summer of 1939. It centers around Angele Maury, a young French actress who takes a detour during a trip to visit her deceased father's side of the family at their estate in a small village. She becomes close to her cousins Tom, Martin, and Jo, but clashes with their mother, her aunt Hannah. Martin and Tom both fall in love with Angele, and her reciprocal feelings for one of them causes further conflict with Hannah.
The Last of Summer is beautifully written and has something of the texture and feeling of the best 19th century novels while being thoroughly of its own time. O'Brien does an amazing job of weaving in the tensions and anxieties created by the coming of war into the story, and even using them as a parallel for the emotional ecstasies, upheavals, and conflicts among the main characters. All of the characters are very well-drawn, and their interactions and relationships portrayed with keen insight.

[Kitty]

This is a rather charming if slightly dated character piece, set in 1939 when a young French actress turns up unannounced at the country house of her Irish father's family. During the course of a week both brothers vie for her affections, while the matriarch tries to keep her at arms length. There is very little plot otherwise, but the setting and dialogue are wonderfully 'of the period' (this was written only a few years after it is set, in 1942) and the culmination rather touching and melancholy.

[Jan]

An interesting read with good strong characters, in the main very likeable, and in fairly believable situations.

The story doesn't have very much substance but is a look at a brief period of time when a "lost" cousin from Paris makes contact with the old family back in Ireland. Its hard to believe the whole book covers little more than a week.

I especially enjoyed their day out at the seaside which was beautifully written and really evoked the atmosphere of a country fair. (EMC)

[Lynn]

The entirety of this novel takes place within a ten-day time period just before the beginning of WWII. It's hard to believe all the emotions and drama take place within such a short time period, because it's a lot! It's one of those books that I don't think is particularly good, and I didn't particularly enjoy it, but I'll probably remember it all the same.

[S M]

A country house in Ireland where the eldest son has left under a dark cloud and is never spoken of again. He goes to France, marries a French actress and they have a daughter. When both parents are dead, the daughter visits the family in the summer of 1939. Mayhem ensues! A tour de force.

[Rita]

1943
After by chance reading Mary Lavelle, I was pleased to have discover yet another excellent author of the past who was previously unknown to me.

Found another of her works on my own shelf [also a Virago edition], also excellent: The Ante-room, with an Afterword [1988] by Deirdre Madden.

Came across an excellent Introduction [1999] by Clare Boylan included in the edition of 'The Land of Spices' on Google Books. Reflections on O'Brien's life and career, as well as discussion of the book itself, most of which is there for anyone to read online.

Virago has published:
Without My cloak 1931 [1st novel]
Mary Lavelle 1936
Farewell Spain 1937 [travel book]
The Land of Spices 1942
That Lady 1946
The Ante-Room 1934
The Last of Summer 1943

[Michelle Hyland]

This was a rather intriguing book with an open end.

The relationship between Angele and her suitors was a little bit uncomfortable.

I won't go into detail as I do not want to spoil it.

The house in this book is an actual house in County Limerick.

Unfortunately the house is no longer there however the gate lodge and gate can still be seen.

I enjoyed this much more than "Not Without My Cloak."

[Marva]

I found this old book very interesting. It doesn't have much of a plot but it's good on character portrayal.

[r]

Why is this written well when the main love interests are cousins. Why.