Editing Patrick O'Brian (section)

===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>