Golden Memories. The Love Letters and the Prison Letters of William O’Brien. Edited with a Personal Appreciation by his Widow, Sophie O’Brien. Dublin: Gill, 1929. First Edition. Pp 204. Frontispiece portrait plate. Cloth boards, title in gilt to spine. Covers damp stained, contents pages bright & clean.

*Presentation copy, Inscribed by Sophie O’Brien on front free endpaper: “To Father Bernard Whelan, in Recollection of Great Kindness. S. O’Brien. Dec 1928. Bellview House, Mallow.”  

Sophie Raffalovich (1860-1960), married the Irish journalist and politician, William O’Brien, in 1890 (Charles Stuart Parnell was Best Man). Her father was a wealthy Jewish banker and merchant from Odessa, who moved his family to France in the early 1860s to escape persecution. After her husband’s death in February 1928, she devoted herself into safeguarding his reputation by getting some of his works reprinted and preparing manuscript commentaries on his letters. Returning to live in France in 1933, she deposited her husband’s papers at University College Cork and the National Library of Ireland. Her final years were lived in poverty and she died in the village of Neuilly St Front in 1960.

*(The O’Brien’s moved to Bellevue House, Mallow, County Cork in 1912).