Lord Dunsany

ELT 39:2 1996 pride in the ability to read and write [which] often led to a wish to publish, and poetry seems to have been a favorite medium." This created a surge of writing, much of it religious in nature, but covering a wide range of topics and composed by authors whose occupations ranged from the lowest to the highest. Reilly believes these poems deserve further investigation from a late-twentieth-century perspective, explaining, "Even those poets whose work is of modest literary merit should attract more attention; their verses reflect life in their time, often saying in a few telling lines what would otherwise take a chapter of prose." Certainly a creative goal, but according to her, such study has not been possible as "no comprehensive bibliography of Victorian poetry exists" and, seeing a void, she has attempted to remedy it in this, the first of a planned three-volume work. She hopefully says that it "will fill a long-existing gap in the history of English literature; it will provide the 'seed cord' for scholars of nineteenth-century poetry; it will become a working tool for librarians, social historians, bibliographers, antiquarian booksellers and others." Obviously a challenging objective, but at the book's high price one wonders how many of its intended users it will reach. In spite of the huge amount of research required to compile this well-intentioned book, it appears to be but another of the current rash of encyclopedic information compendiums, frequently multi-volumed and generally published at extravagantly high prices, seemingly intended for purchase by large libraries rather than by individual scholars , who might require such a reference readably available on their shelves for consultation. Edwin Gilcher ______________ Cherry Plain, New York Lord Dunsany S. T. Joshi. Lord Dunsany: Master of the Anglo-Irish Imagination. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1995. xiii + 230 pp. $55.00 ALITTLE MORE THAN two weeks after this book was published, a writer in the travel section of the New York Times described a visit to Dunsany Castle, Co. Meath, Ireland, the ancestral home of the Plunkett family, and characterized the 18th Baron Dunsany, Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett (1878-1957), as "a noted traveler, soldier and sportsman ." The details in the article suggested that its writer would have known that the man he thus described was once a well-known author 272 BOOK REVIEWS as well, but it is a sad and exact measure of Lord Dunsany's latter-day literary reputation that this fact wasn't considered important enough to mention. A full day's due and diligent search by this reviewer for some evidence of Dunsany's half-century of authorship yielded results which were meager and disheartening. The local public library contained no book of Dunsany's, a stack of old book catalogues contained not one reference to him, a visit to a well-stocked used book shop elicited only a blank stare from its owner and a promise to conduct a search, and Books in Print offered only a half-dozen of those expensive reprints that now fill the space beneath the names of authors of the transitional period. Dunsany 's decline and disappearance from the collective memory of the late-twentieth century would seem to be virtually complete. S. T. Joshi—who also co-authored a 1993 bibliography of Dunsany, reviewed in ELT by Edwin Gilcher (38:2, 273-75)—offers compelling reasons, small and large, to explain this precipitous decline, attributing it in varying degrees to changing fashions in literature and literary history, the weight and direction of modern Irish history, and to the man himself and his unfashionable and aristocratic habits, tastes, and politics . Joshi's book is a welcome and credible attempt to focus fresh attention on Dunsany's work and to restore a measure of his rightful literary reputation. Lord Dunsany comes to us dressed up as volume no. 64 in a series of science fiction and fantasy studies and, while Joshi manages to discharge his debt to his publisher by describing Dunsany's achievements and influence in those fields in some detail, he also strays far enough from the series's limits to attend to the other aspects...