Kate O'Brien was born in Limerick in 1897. On graduating from University College, Dublin, she worked as a journalist in Manchester and London and then as a governess in Spain. Her original success was as a playwright but the publication of WITHOUT MY CLOAK in 1931 won her rapid acclaim as a novelist, winning both the Hawthornden and James Tait Black prizes. This was followed by eight more novels, two of which, MARY LAVELLE and THE LAND OF SPICES, were condemned for their `immorality' by the Irish Censorship Board. Her most successful novel, THAT LADY, set in sixteenth-century Spain, was made into a film starring Olivia De Havilland. She died in 1974.