The Last of Summer

This evocative novel, published in 1943, is set in West Clare during the last few days of countdown to the outbreak of the Second World War. The central character, Angèle, the French daughter of a Clare man, decides to visit his family home for the first time. There she meets for the first time her Uncle Ned’s widow, Hannah, and children, Tom, Martin and Josephine. Though they are first cousins, she and Tom quickly fall in love and become engaged before the outbreak of war in her native country intervenes.

The author, Kate O'Brien (born 3 December 1897), grew up in Limerick, spending much of her childhood in boarding school after the death of her mother. She studied English and French at University College Dublin and began work as a teacher. While working as a governess in the Basque city of Bilbao from 1922 to1923, she began to write fiction. Her novel, Mary Lavelle, published in 1936, was largely based on her own experiences there. Her debut novel, Without My Cloak, won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction in 1931. She spent most of her life in England away from the conservative strictures of de Valera’s Ireland.

Tom Kernahan, father of the central character, had left home in 1909 and never returned. When his brother, Cornelius, is asked about the First World War, he recalls his own limited experience and what he knew of Tom’s involvement:
“Were you in that other war, Corney?"
"No. I volunteered for the South Irish Horse, but they rejected me. Said I was C3, if you'll believe me! And Ned didn't go either — he had a wife and two children already, and the whole of this place depending on him. He made a good deal of money out of it, I can't deny. But Hannah was anti-British even then, and wouldn't have let him join up, if he'd wanted...
Tom was in it though... I remember Ned hearing some way that he was attached to a French regiment, and doing liaison work with the British. I remember we were delighted it was for the French he was fighting. And then in 1917 Ned had a postcard from him to say he was invalided out. That was the last news I ever had of him until nine years later, when Ned told me he was dead.”

Towards the end of the novel, Martin resolves to follow in his uncle’s footsteps, intending to join the French army. His sister has immediate plans to go to Brussels to become a nun. We are left to wonder what would have happened to Angèle and her cousins, Irish and French, during the war that had just been declared.