Born July 2nd, 1930
Died August 1st, 2025
Limerick-based novelist, poet, short story writer and feminist activist, Maeve Kelly has died aged 95. Described by friends and colleagues as a fearless advocate for women and children suffering from domestic abuse, Kelly was the co-founder of the Limerick women’s refuge Adapt House in the 1970s. She went on to be the administrator of that charity for 15 years.
Kelly, who trained as a nurse at St Andrew’s Hospital, London, and worked in Oxford before returning to Ireland, was also the founder of the Limerick Federation of Women’s Organisations and the National Federation of Refugees. She was a member of the Council for the Status of Women, a precursor of the National Women’s Council of Ireland.
RM Block
Helen O’Donnell, chairwoman of Adapt House while Kelly was to the fore, says that women suffering from domestic violence trusted her. “This was a time in Ireland when women left their jobs after marriage. At home with their children, they had no autonomy and no money of their own. They were too embarrassed and ashamed to share their problems with other family members but they felt comfortable speaking with Maeve,” says O’Donnell.
In a letter to The Irish Times in 1975, Kelly wrote that victims of domestic abuse were “the most cruelly treated of our citizens” and that many husbands of beaten women “regard the legal system as upholding their right to abuse and neglect their wives as they see fit”. She was acutely aware of the prevailing moral code of the political system and church authorities not to interfere in the private domain of the family.
The Limerick refuge, which was the first residential centre for women suffering from domestic violence in Ireland, initially operated from secret buildings in the city before getting permission to adapt a building owned by the local health authority.
[ Maeve Kelly: fighting for women and writing about themOpens in new window ]
Kelly began writing fiction in earnest when she was in her 40s. Her first published short story appeared in the New Irish Writing pages of the Irish Press in 1971. The following year she won a Hennessy Literary Award alongside writers Fred Johnson, Ita Daly and Patrick Cunningham. Her first collection of short stories, A Life of Her Own, was published by Poolbeg Press in 1976.
Her novels, Necessary Treasons (1985) and Florrie’s Girls (1989), and another short-story collection, Orange Horses (1990), came next. Then in 1993, her satirical feminist fairytale Alice in Thunderland was published.
Kelly also had three collections of poetry published: Resolution (1986) Lament for Oona (2005) and A Last Loving (2016).
In 2016 Tramp Press republished Orange Horses as part of their Recovered Voices series. In the introduction, lecturer in English literature at Carlow College Dr Simon Workman said that Kelly’s aim in her short stories was “to bring marginalised – particularly female – forms of experience into the larger national consciousness”.
Comparing her work to that of the short-story writer Mary Lavin and novelist Edna O’Brien, Workman said Kelly’s fiction dealt with many of the injustices that women of that generation faced – lack of access to education, lack of progression in male-dominated careers and lack of security in the home. Kelly’s writing also focused on the sidelining of women in the newly independent Ireland and the experience of Irish women in England after the second World War.
“While her fiction sought to dismantle the repressive cultural ideals prevailing in Ireland’s political and legal systems, her activism fostered a more direct challenge to the institutions which enacted and buttressed the prejudices linked to such beliefs,” wrote Workman.
At a time when fewer female authors were published, Kelly also faced the negative bias of male literary critics, one of whom described her work as “melodramatic”. In a 1984 review of fiction by Irish women, writer Susan McKay noted that Kelly was “one of the writers who made a consistent stand against the conventions of her times”.
As well as her personal support to women and children suffering domestic violence, Kelly initiated a study on violence in the home, Breaking the Silence (1992), drawing on the testimonies from the women who had used the services of Adapt House.
She was born in Ennis, Co Clare, the third of five children of Ellen and Michael Joseph Kelly. Her father was a managing clerk in a firm of solicitors, and her mother had been a nurse in London before marriage. The family moved to Dundalk, Co Louth, in 1936 and Maeve attended St Vincent’s Girls School in Dundalk for her secondary education.
Maeve contracted tuberculosis when training to be a theatre nurse in Oxford. And it was while she was a patient in a sanatorium in Oxford, that Limerick man Gerard O’Brien Kelly proposed to her. The couple had met earlier when Maeve was home on holidays. They married in 1958.
In their early years of marriage, Maeve and Gerard farmed in Co Clare. They sold the farm in 1972 and moved closer to Limerick city with their children, Joseph and Oona. “My mother encouraged me to read widely as a child and acted on her conscience when she witnessed injustices during my early education,” says her son, Joe Kelly, who now works as a solicitor in London.
Oona was killed in a motorcycle crash in March 1991 just before she was due to finish her fine art degree at the Limerick School of Art and Design. Maeve’s husband subsequently died in 2013. She continued to live in the family home with the help of carers until earlier this year, after which she moved to a nearby nursing home.
Her poetry collection Lament for Oona includes poems deeply infused with grief written in the years after her daughter’s death. The collection was illustrated by paintings and drawings by Oona, and her daughter’s art work is also on the cover of Kelly’s final collection of poems, A Last Loving.
Poets Vivienne McKechnie and Jo Slade, who compiled Kelly’s last collection of poetry, remained close friends of hers in her latter years. “She was incredibly supportive to writers and women writers in particular,” says McKechnie. Kelly’s last reading made public was when a recording of her reading of her poem, Lament, in her kitchen was put out on social media for a Limerick Literary Festival event in April 2022.
She is survived by her son, Joe Kelly; her grandchildren, George, Oliver and Sophie; and her brother, Brian. Her daughter, Oona; and her husband, Gerard, predeceased her as did her siblings, Pamela, Sheila and Seamus.
