When the author Patrick O’Brian died earlier this year, he took to the grave with him a man called Richard Russ. O’Brian, the novelist behind the much revered Aubrey-Maturin nautical series, was a Roman Catholic born in the west of Ireland. Or so his readers believed for more than 50 years. Two years before his death, it was revealed that O’Brian was not so.
As elucidated in Dean King’s recently published biography, O’Brian’s real name was Richard Russ, and he was born in England to a Protestant father of German extraction, who worked in London as a doctor, and an English mother. Patrick O’Brian was a name that he assumed in 1945 and, for more than half a century, an identity that came to consume him, slowly erasing his old self from history.
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