Editing Patrick O'Brian (section)

==Personal life and privacy==

===Childhood, early career and marriages===
O'Brian was christened as Richard Patrick Russ, in [[Chalfont St Peter]], [[Buckinghamshire]], a son of Charles Russ, an English physician of German descent, and Jessie Russ (née Goddard), an English woman of Irish descent.{{citation needed|date=January 2020}} The eighth of nine children, O'Brian lost his mother at the age of four, and his biographers describe a fairly isolated childhood, limited by poverty, with sporadic schooling, at [[St Marylebone Grammar School]] from 1924 to 1926, while living in Putney, and then at [[Lewes Grammar School]], from September 1926 to July 1929, after the family moved to [[Lewes]], [[East Sussex]],<ref name="Tolstoyp72">{{Cite book |last=Tolstoy |first=Nikolai |title=Patrick O'Brian: The making of the novelist |publisher=Arrow |year=2005 |isbn=978-0393061307 |page=72 |author-link=Nikolai Tolstoy}}</ref> but with intervals at home with his father and stepmother Zoe Center.<ref name="GBrown">{{Cite book |last=Brown |first=Anthony Gary |url=http://www.hmssurprise.org/patrick-and-mary-obrian |title=The Patrick O'Brian Muster Book: Persons, Animals, Ships and Cannon in the Aubrey–Maturin Sea Novels |publisher=McFarland & Company |year=2014 |isbn=978-0-7864-2482-5 |edition=Second |location=Jefferson, North Carolina |orig-year=2006}}</ref>

His literary career began in his childhood, with the publication of his earliest works, including several short stories. The book ''[[Hussein, An Entertainment]]''  published by [[Oxford University Press]] in 1938, and the short-story collection ''Beasts Royal'' brought considerable critical praise, [[Novelist#Age and experience|especially considering his youth]].<ref name=kinglrev/> He published his first novel at age 15, ''Caesar: The Life Story of a Panda Leopard'', with help from his father.<ref name=kinglrev />{{rp|50}}<ref name="Veale">{{Cite news |last=Veale |first=Scott |date=5 March 2000 |title=The Man Without a Past |work=[[The New York Times]] |department=Review |url=https://www.nytimes.com/books/00/03/05/reviews/000305.05vealet.html |access-date=4 June 2015}}</ref><ref>{{Cite book |last=O'Brian |first=Patrick |title=Caesar: The Life Story of a Panda Leopard |date=17 April 2001 |publisher=W W Norton |isbn=978-0393321821 |orig-year=1930}}</ref>

In 1927 he applied unsuccessfully to enter the [[Britannia Royal Naval College|Royal Naval College, Dartmouth]].<ref name="Tolstoyp80">{{Cite book |last=Tolstoy |first=Nikolai |title=Patrick O'Brian: The making of the novelist |publisher=Arrow |year=2005 |isbn=978-0393061307 |page=80 |author-link=Nikolai Tolstoy}}</ref> In 1934, he underwent a brief period of pilot training with the [[Royal Air Force]], but that was not successful and he left the RAF. Prior to that, his application to join the [[Royal Navy]] had been rejected on health grounds.<ref name=GBrown /> In 1935, he was living in London, where he married his first wife, Elizabeth Jones, in 1936. They had two children. The second was a daughter who suffered from [[spina bifida]], and died in 1942, aged three, in a country village in Sussex. When the child died, O'Brian had already returned to London, where he worked throughout the war.

The details of his employment during the [[Second World War]] are murky. He worked as an ambulance driver, and he stated that he worked in intelligence in the [[Political Intelligence Department (1939–1943)|Political Intelligence Department]] (PID).<ref>{{Cite news |date=7 January 2000 |title=Patrick O'Brian |work=The Telegraph |url=https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/culture-obituaries/books-obituaries/6916742/Patrick-OBrian.html |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20100108084432/http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/culture-obituaries/books-obituaries/6916742/Patrick-OBrian.html |url-status=dead |archive-date=8 January 2010 |access-date=19 February 2019}}</ref> [[Dean King]] has said O'Brian was actively involved in intelligence work and perhaps special operations overseas during the war.<ref name="kinglrev">{{Cite book |last=King |first=Dean |title=Patrick O'Brian:A life revealed |publisher=Hodder & Stoughton |year=2000 |isbn=0-340-79255-8 |location=London |author-link=Dean King}}</ref>{{rp|89–104}} Indeed, despite his usual extreme reticence about his past, O'Brian wrote in an essay, "Black, Choleric and Married?", included in the book ''Patrick O'Brian: Critical Appreciations and a Bibliography'' (1994)<ref name=cunningham1994>{{cite book |title=Patrick O'Brian: Critical Appreciations and a Bibliography |editor=Cunningham, A.E. |year=1994 |publisher=The British Library Publishing Division |location=London |isbn=0-7123-1070-3 |pages=15–19 }}</ref> that: "Some time after the blitz had died away I joined one of those intelligence organisations that flourished during the War, perpetually changing their initials and competing with one another. Our work had to do with France, and more than that I shall not say, since disclosing methods and stratagems that have deceived the enemy once and that may deceive him again seems to me foolish. After the war we retired to Wales (I say we because my wife and I had driven ambulances and served in intelligence together) where we lived for a while in a high Welsh-speaking valley..." which confirms in first person the intelligence connection, as well as introducing his wife Mary Tolstoy, née Wicksteed, as a co-worker and fellow intelligence operative.

[[Nikolai Tolstoy]], [[stepson]] through O'Brian's marriage to Mary, disputes that account,<ref>{{cite book |title=Patrick O'Brian: The making of the novelist |last=Tolstoy |first=Nikolai |author-link=Nikolai Tolstoy |year=2005 |publisher=Arrow |isbn=978-0393061307 |pages=269–274 }}</ref> confirming only that O'Brian worked as a volunteer ambulance driver during the [[The Blitz|Blitz]] when he met Mary, the separated wife of Russian-born nobleman and [[lawyer]] Count Dimitri Tolstoy. They lived together through the latter part of the war and, after both were divorced from their previous spouses, they married in July 1945. The following month he changed his name by [[deed poll]] to Patrick O'Brian.

=== Sailing experience ===
As background to his later sea-going novels, O'Brian did claim to have had limited experience on a square-rigged sailing vessel, as described within his previously-quoted 1994 essay:

{{Quote|text=The disease that racked my bosom every now and then did not much affect my strength and when it left me in peace (for there were long remissions) sea-air and sea-voyages were recommended. An uncle had a two-ton [[sloop]] and several friends had boats, which was fine, but what was even better was that my particular friend Edward, who shared a tutor with me, had a cousin who possessed an ocean-going yacht, a converted square-rigged [[merchantman]], that he used to crew with undergraduates and fair-sized boys, together with some real seamen, and sail far off into the Atlantic. The young are wonderfully resilient, and although I never became much of a topman, after a while I could hand, reef and steer without disgrace, which allowed more ambitious sailoring later on.<ref name="cunningham1994" />}}

However, in 1995, venture capitalist [[Thomas Perkins (businessman)|Thomas Perkins]] offered O'Brian a two-week cruise aboard his then sailing yacht, a {{convert|154|ft|m|adj=on}} [[ketch]]. In an article about the experience written after O'Brian's death, Perkins commented that "... his knowledge of the practical aspects of sailing seemed, amazingly, almost nil" and "... he seemed to have no feeling for the wind and the course, and frequently I had to intervene to prevent a full standing [[jibe|gybe]]. I began to suspect that his autobiographical references to his months at sea as a youth were fanciful."<ref>{{cite web |url=https://www.latitude38.com/features/O'Brian.htm |title=Cruising with Patrick O'Brian – The Man and the Myth |last=Perkins |first=Tom |publisher=Latitude 38|date=August 2000 |access-date=30 March 2017}}</ref>

===Life after the Second World War===
Between 1946 and 1949 the O'Brians lived in [[Croesor|Cwm Croesor]], a remote valley in north Wales, where they initially rented a cottage from [[Clough Williams-Ellis]]. O'Brian pursued his interest in [[natural history]]; he fished, went birdwatching, and followed the local hunt. During this time they lived on Mary O'Brian's small income and the limited earnings from O'Brian's writings.

In 1949 O'Brian and Mary moved to [[Collioure]], a Catalan town in southern France. He and Mary remained together in Collioure until her death in 1998. Mary's love and support were critical to O'Brian throughout his career. She worked with him in the British Library in the 1940s as he collected source material for his anthology ''A Book of Voyages'', which became the first book to bear his new name – the book was among his favourites, because of this close collaboration. The death of his wife in March 1998 was a tremendous blow to O'Brian. In the last two years of his life, particularly once the details of his early life were revealed to the world, he was a "lonely, tortured, and at the last possibly paranoid figure."<ref name="Tolstoy">{{cite book |last=Tolstoy |first=Nikolai |title=Patrick O'Brian: The making of the novelist |publisher=Random House |location=London |year=2004 |isbn=0-09-941584-4}}</ref>

===Media exposure and controversy in his final years===
O'Brian protected his privacy fiercely and was usually reluctant to reveal any details about his private life or past, preferring to include no biographical details on his book jackets and supplying only a minimum of personal information when pressed to do so.<ref name="Tolstoy" /> For many years reviewers and journalists presumed he was Irish,<ref>For example, [[Lord Dunsany]] referred to ''The Last Pool'' as "this charming book by an Irish sportsman" in a 1950 ''[[The Observer|Observer]]'' review (Tolstoy, 324), and [[William Waldegrave, Baron Waldegrave of North Hill|William Waldegrave]], reviewing ''The Wine-Dark Sea'' in 1993, was still referring to O'Brian's supposed "Irish, French and English childhood" (William Waldegrave, ''Patrick O'Brian'', reprinted in Patrick O'Brian, ''The Reverse of the Medal'', HarperCollins reprinted 2003)</ref> and he took no steps to correct the impression. One interviewer, Mark Horowitz, described the man in his late seventies as "a compact, austere gentleman.&nbsp;... his pale, watchful eyes are clear and alert."<ref name=Horowitz /> He is polite, formal, and erudite in conversation, an erudition that Horowitz said could be intimidating. He learned from those who worked with O'Brian that the erudition did not go unnoticed, while they remained friends.

Richard Ollard, a [[naval historian]], calls this particular habit "blowing people out of the game." Ollard, who edited the early Aubrey–Maturin novels, urged O'Brian to tone down the most obscure allusions, though the books remain crammed with Latin tags, antiquated [[medical terminology]] and an endless stream of marvellous-sounding but impenetrable naval jargon. "Like many who have struggled themselves", Ollard said of his friend, "he thought others should struggle, too." One longtime acquaintance put it more bluntly: "Patrick can be a bit of a snob, socially and intellectually."<ref name=Horowitz />

In 1998, a [[BBC]] documentary and an [[Investigative journalism|exposé]] in ''[[The Daily Telegraph]]''<ref name="Telegraph Fenton">{{cite web |url=https://www.telegraph.co.uk/htmlContent.jhtml?html=/archive/1999/10/24/nobr24.html |title=The Secret Life of Patrick O'Brian |last=Fenton |first=Ben |date=24 October 1999 |work=[[The Daily Telegraph]] |access-date=26 August 2008 |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20060105221749/http://www.telegraph.co.uk/htmlContent.jhtml?html=%2Farchive%2F1999%2F10%2F24%2Fnobr24.html |archive-date=5 January 2006 }}</ref> made public the facts of his ancestry, original name and first marriage, provoking considerable critical media comment. In his biography of O'Brian,<ref name="Tolstoy" /> Nikolai Tolstoy claims to give a more accurate and balanced account of his late stepfather's character, actions and motives, particularly in respect of his first marriage and family.

[[John Lanchester]] in reviewing Tolstoy's book, says "The last few years have been disheartening for Patrick O'Brian's many fans."<ref name=Lanchester>{{cite news |url=https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/3626812/Remember-him-as-a-writer.html |title=Remember him as a writer |date=9 November 2004 |last=Lanchester |first=John |newspaper=The Telegraph |access-date=4 June 2015}}</ref> He does not find the arguments altogether persuasive, and with access to documents that Dean King never saw, Tolstoy "gives a portrait of a man who is cold, bullying, isolated, snobbish and super-sensitive."<ref name=Lanchester /> Lanchester closes by saying "Let's agree, we O'Brianists, to read the novels and forget everything else."  Veale, in reviewing King's book, says that "however judicious and well-grounded his [King's] speculation, he fails to crack his subject's protective shell. In the end, Aubrey and Maturin will have to thrive on their own—which is how the willfully enigmatic O'Brian most likely intended it."<ref name=Veale />

Horowitz interviewed O'Brian at his home in France in 1994: "Until recently, he refused all interviews. Those authors we know the least about, he says, are the ones we get in their purest form, like Homer. In ''Clarissa Oakes'' (published as ''The Truelove'' in the US), Stephen warns would-be interviewers that "question and answer is not a civilised form of conversation." O'Brian deflects direct inquiries about his private life, and when asked why he moved to the south of France after World War II, he stops and fixes his interrogator with a cold stare. "That seems to be getting rather close to a personal question," he says softly, walking on."<ref name=Horowitz />

At his death, many obituaries were published evaluating his work, particularly in the Aubrey–Maturin series, and the revelations of his biography prior to his marriage to Mary Wicksteed Tolstoy.<ref>{{cite web |url=https://www.nytimes.com/library/books/010700obit-obrian.html |title=Patrick O'Brian, Whose 20 Sea Stories Won Him International Fame, Dies at 85 |last=Prial |first=Frank J |newspaper=[[The New York Times]] |date=7 January 2000 |quote=Critics likened the O'Brian books to the sequential novels of Trollope and Anthony Powell, but the comparison that pleased O'Brian most was to Jane Austen. }}</ref><ref>{{cite news |url=http://www.salon.com/2000/01/13/o_brian/ |title= Patrick O'Brian: The author of the wildly popular 18th century seagoing saga created, out of his own life, a fiction nearly as elaborate |last=Williams |first=Ian |magazine=Salon |date=13 January 2000 |access-date=8 June 2015}}</ref><ref>{{cite web |url=http://articles.philly.com/2000-01-08/news/25599146_1_aubrey-maturin-series-patrick-o-brian-stephen-maturin |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20151231223144/http://articles.philly.com/2000-01-08/news/25599146_1_aubrey-maturin-series-patrick-o-brian-stephen-maturin |url-status=dead |archive-date=31 December 2015 |title=Novelist Patrick O'Brian, Writer of Naval Series, Dies |last=Romano |first=Carlin |newspaper=[[The Philadelphia Inquirer]] |date=8 January 2000 |access-date=8 June 2015}}</ref><ref>{{cite web |url=https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-jan-08-mn-52007-story.html |title=Patrick O'Brian; British Master of the High-Seas Adventure Novel |last=Balzar |first=John |newspaper=[[Los Angeles Times]] |date= 8 January 2000 |access-date=8 June 2015}}</ref><ref name=IrishTimes>{{cite web |url=http://www.irishtimes.com/news/author-patrick-o-brian-dies-in-dublin-1.231499 |title=Author Patrick O'Brian Dies in Dublin |last=Holland |first=Kitty |newspaper=The Irish Times |date=7 January 2000 |access-date=8 June 2015}}</ref><ref>{{cite news |url=https://www.theguardian.com/news/2000/jan/08/guardianobituaries.booksobituaries |title=Patrick O'Brian |last=Webb |first=W L |date=8 January 2000 |newspaper=The Guardian |access-date=8 June 2015}}</ref> Playwright [[David Mamet]] wrote an appreciation.<ref>{{cite web |url=https://www.nytimes.com/library/books/011700mamet-writing.html |title=The Humble Genre Novel, Sometimes Full of Genius |last=Mamet |first=David |newspaper=[[The New York Times]] |date=17 January 2000 |quote=His Aubrey-Maturin series, 20 novels of the Royal Navy in the Napoleonic Wars, is a masterpiece. It will outlive most of today's putative literary gems as Sherlock Holmes has outlived Bulwer-Lytton, as Mark Twain has outlived Charles Reade. God bless the straightforward writer, and God bless those with the ability to amuse, provoke, surprise, shock, appall. |access-date=8 June 2015}}</ref> His American publisher, W. W. Norton, wrote an appreciation, mentioning their story with O'Brian, how pleased they were the three times he came to the US, in 1993, 1995 and in November 1999 only weeks before his death, and noting sales in the US alone of over three million copies.<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.wwnorton.com/pob/bio.htm |title=Patrick O'Brian |publisher=W W Norton |year=2003 |access-date=8 June 2015}}</ref>