Liminal Spaces and Minority Communities in the Twentieth Century

With travel and transitions a central part of the fiction of mid-twentieth-century novelist and playwright Kate O’Brien, the second chapter explores the concept of queer ‘minority communities’ within the liminal spaces described in two of O’Brien’s most overtly lesbian novels, Mary Lavelle (1936) and As Music and Splendour (1958). Applying queer theorist Alan Sinfield’s description of ‘minority communities’ to O’Brien work, this chapter explores how the liminal space is simultaneously both oppressive and offers, to differing degrees, a space in which heteronormative ideologies are challenged with the context of 1930s’ Irish gender and sexual ideologies.