Flannery is from the Irish surname Ó Flannghaile — flann (red) + gal (valor). Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964) — the *American Southern Gothic novelist and short-story writer whose Wise Blood (1952), A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955), and The Violent Bear It Away (1960) defined a uniquely Catholic, grotesque, and theological strain of mid-century American fiction. Diagnosed with lupus at 25 (the same disease that killed her father), she lived and wrote for fourteen more years on her mother's farm in Milledgeville, Georgia, where she raised peacocks. Posthumous National Book Award (1972) for her Complete Stories*.
Subject of Brad Gooch's Flannery: A Life (2009).
Flannery does not currently appear in the US Social Security Administration's top 1,000 girls' names, so we don't publish a US rank or birth count for it. That says nothing about the name's standing elsewhere in the world — only that it sits outside the ranked US data we rely on.
In Pythagorean numerology the letters of Flannery reduce to 5, The Seeker. This is a traditional interpretive system, not a factual claim about the name.