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. 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, but with intervals at home with his father and stepmother Zoe Center. 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,
especially considering his youth. In 1927 he applied unsuccessfully to enter the
Royal Naval College, Dartmouth. 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.
Dean King has said O'Brian was actively involved in intelligence work and perhaps special operations overseas during the war. 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) 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, confirming only that O'Brian worked as a volunteer ambulance driver during the
Blitz when he met Mary, the separated wife of Russian-born nobleman and lawyer Count Dmitry 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: Venture capitalist Thomas Perkins found O'Brian lacked practical knowledge when it came to sailing Perkins' superyacht in 1995.
Life after the Second World War Between 1946 and 1949 the O'Brians lived in
Cwm Croesor, a remote valley in north Wales, where they initially rented a cottage from the architect
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 Museum 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."
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. 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. ... his pale, watchful eyes are clear and alert." made public the facts of his ancestry, original name and first marriage, provoking considerable critical media comment. In his biography of O'Brian, 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." Playwright
David Mamet wrote an appreciation. 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. ==Death==