Late Nineteenth-Century Ireland’s Political and Religious Controversies in the Fiction of May Laffan Hartley
Publication Year: 2005
Published by: ELT Press
Cover
Title Page, Copyright Page
CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I owe many thanks to many people for their help with every stage of this book: first to Sister Declan Power who put the idea of it into my head; then to Professor Tom Dunne of University College Cork who enabled me to make it a reality; also to Helen Davies and the staff of the Boole Library, U.C.C., in particular the staff of the Special ...
INTRODUCTION
The attempt to research the life and works of a forgotten Irish Victorian writer does require some explanation and justification. My explanation is, first of all, that the identity of the writer May Laffan Hartley, although she wrote anonymously, was known to me. She was a friend and first cousin of my father’s mother, who herself died be fore my birth. Some ...
CHAPTER 1. Origins and Early Years
The questioning and challenging disposition in May Laffan, which drew her towards controversial themes, had its origin in a divided inheritance. She was the child of a religiously mixed marriage. Her father, Michael Laffan, came from a Catholic family in Tipperary; her mother, Ellen Sarah Fitzgibbon, came from a newly converted Church of ...
CHAPTER 2. Adult Life and Works
The world presented to us by the novels and stories of May Laffan is almost unique to her, that world of the Irish middle class in the second half of the nineteenth century. Other story tellers had written of peasant life or the trials of the gentry; but she chose to write about the alcoholic ex-student, the impecunious solicitor, the farmer or merchant turned poli-...
CHAPTER 3. Class and Politics in Hogan MP
May Laffan’s first and most successful novel, Hogan MP, was published by Richard Bentley in London in the spring of 1876, when its author was twenty-seven. A satirical novel, it may be fairly compared with two other much better known novels also dating from the last quarter of the nineteenth century: Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live ...
CHAPTER 4. Class, Identity and Education in Miss Ferrard
The second of May Laffan’s four novels, The Honorable Miss Ferrard, was first published by Richard Bentley & Son in 1877. It was reviewed in the same year by the Saturday Review, a politically conservative journal noted for the severity of its views on contemporary literature.1 The anonymous review was on the whole favourable: ...
CHAPTER 5. Conflicting Values, Class and Religion in Christy Carew
Laffan's third novel, Christy Carew, was published by Holt in New York in 1878, and by Macmillan in London in 1880. It seems to have been reviewed less extensively than were her other books, and even the anonymous reviewer in The Cabinet of Irish Literature disposes of it in a few lines: "In Christy Carew, which is the last book of the authoress has pro-...
CHAPTER 6. Stories of Poverty and Hope
Nineteenth-century Ireland was visibly a very poor country, even when the famine had removed from it the poorest rural group. Accounts of travels in and visits to Dublin, the provincial cities and the scenic countryside make that plain.1 The extent of this poverty could not be glossed over or ignored; it permeated not only factual writings about Ireland, ...
CHAPTER 7. A Political Allegory of Fenian Ireland?
In the course of a letter to George Grove, editor of Macmillan's Magazine, about her short story "Weeds," May Laffan referred to other work which she had in hand: "I am busy with a new story of the same class of Irish—but of a different sort & showing different & better feelings." 1, It seems certain that the new story referred to was Ismay's Children, the last of ...
CONCLUSION
May Laffan’s writing life, as we have seen, finished in the early 1880s, and this timing no doubt had some responsibility for the swift descent of her work into obscurity. The literary revival directed by W. B. Yeats, Lady Gregory and their associates, which also began in the 1880s, found plays and poetry more effective than the novel at ...
E-ISBN-13: 9780944318324
Print-ISBN-13: 9780944318188
Print-ISBN-10: 0944318185
Page Count: 288
Illustrations: 1 map
Publication Year: 2005
OCLC Number: 607773219
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