Lois Cahall is a journalist, novelist, and literary festival founder whose career began in Cape Cod and Boston newspapers before expanding to national magazines including Hearst and Condé Nast. She later wrote for top UK outlets such as The Times, RED, and Psychologies.
Her latest novel, The Many Lives & Loves of Hazel Lavery, is a fictionalized portrait of Hazel Martyn Lavery — an American-born socialite, painter’s muse, and symbolic figure in Irish history. Born in Chicago in 1880, Hazel was known as “the most beautiful girl in the Midwest.” At just 17, while engaged to her first husband, Dr. Edward Trudeau Jr., she met the Irish painter John Lavery during a family trip to France. Though Lavery was 24 years her senior and a widower, the two formed an immediate and profound connection. Her mother strongly opposed the match, and Hazel returned to the U.S. to marry Trudeau. Tragically, he died just five months later, leaving Hazel widowed and pregnant with their daughter, Alice. Hazel eventually reunited with John Lavery, and they married in 1909 — ushering her into the elite social and political circles of British and Irish society.
Hazel played a subtle but symbolic role during the Anglo-Irish Treaty negotiations of 1921, when she and her husband lent their South Kensington home to Michael Collins and the Irish delegation. As political tension gripped London, Hazel’s salon offered a rare common ground between British and Irish leaders. Her friendship with Collins was widely rumored to have turned romantic — a central theme in Cahall’s novel, where the love story is imagined as fact. Though historians remain divided on whether the affair actually occurred, auctioned letters and memoirs from Hazel’s contemporaries lend credence to the enduring speculation.
After Collins’ assassination in 1922, Hazel was reported to be devastated. In 1928, the Irish Free State government selected her image — painted by Sir John Lavery — as the female personification of Ireland on the new banknotes, where she remained a national icon until the introduction of the euro in 2002.
Cahall uses this cultural and historical backdrop to explore Hazel’s emotional life, political intuition, and deep entanglements with key figures of the time, including Winston Churchill, Kevin O’Higgins, George Bernard Shaw, and W.B. Yeats.
In addition to her fiction writing, Cahall previously served as Creative Director of Development for James Patterson and founded both the Palm Beach and Cape Cod Book Festivals, nonprofit events promoting literacy and literature.
She divides her time between Cape Cod and New York. Lois Cahall will read from The Many Lives & Loves of Hazel Lavery on Saturday at 1:00 PM in Room 111.