Kate O'Brien'S Farewell Spain: Spain and the Spanish civil war as explained to an English readership by an Irishwoman

Abstract

Kate O'Brien's Farewell Spain (1937) is a 'nostalgic' travel book set during the Second Republic (1931-36) and the Spanish Civil War (1936-39), based on her ten-month stay in the Basque Country in the 1920s and on her pre-war journeys in central and northern Spain in the 1930s. The author, who seems to have sympathized with the Spanish Anarchists, took sides with the legally-constituted Republic and did not disguise her opposition to the Spanish 1936 military uprising or her ideological disagreement with Communism. This did not prevent her from also using an overtly anglocentric didactic approach when trying to 'explain' Spain as she recalled it from previous journeys. In Farewell Spain, O'Brien pays special attention to describing Spanish issues which she believed would be of interest to the English reader. Her impressions, opinions, memories and descriptions of Spain before the Civil War as well as of the war itself are constantly contrasted and compared not only with British culture, history and literature, in an evident attempt to cater to an English readership, but also with her Irishness, of which she felt proud.