“Teresa speaks to poets”: Mystical Experience, Apology and Literary Creation in Kate O’Brien’s Teresa of Ávila

Abstract

Kate O’Brien’s connection to Spain, and the extent to which it is central to her work, has been widely studied using as background information the eight months she spent in Bilbao working as a governess (1922-23), an experience which inspired her novel Mary Lavelle (1936). However, her biography of Teresa of Avila has received less scholarly attention than the rest of her novels or travelogues.  Although O’Brien referred to the Spanish writer and mystic in many of her works and interviews, she especially celebrated her in the biography Teresa of Avila (1951). In this essay, I will start by tracing the similarities between the lives of Kate O’Brien and Teresa of Avila in order to emphasize O’Brien’s identification with Teresa of Avila. I am going to argue, firstly, that Kate O’Brien’s biography of Teresa is as much a defence of herself as a writer against her censors and detractors, as it is a passionate apology of the Spanish mystic, just as Teresa’s The Book of Her Life is a theological apology written in order to justify herself to her confessors. Secondly, that Kate O’Brien, drawing on the terminology of Teresa’s mystical method, traces a parallelism between the mystical experience and the act of creative writing.