Late Nineteenth-Century Ireland's Political & Religious Controversies in the Fiction of May Laffan Hartley (review)

Recovering forgotten, neglected nineteenth-century writers requires the patience, perseverance, and intelligence to know which leads to follow and which to ignore; Helena Kelleher Kahn's examination of May Laffan Hartley's (1849–1916) writing skillfully navigates the challenges of such recovery work. Scholars might contest whether this minor Irish author requires a book-length study, but Kahn makes the case for such an undertaking. She provides a sociohistorical context for middle-class Irish life that clearly articulates the principal issues of this culturally and politically dynamic period to both novice and academic readers of Irish fiction. Extensively researched with abundant endnotes, this book should be compulsory reading for those studying the marginalized Irish women writers of the nineteenth century.

Hartley, who preferred to remain anonymous, wrote lengthy three-volume novels. Between 1874 and 1887, she published four novels: Hogan, M.P. (1876), The Honourable Miss Ferrard (1877), Christy Carew (1878), and Ismay's Children (1887). In addition, she wrote four short stories, one of which ("Flitters, Tatters, and the Counsellor" [1879]) William Butler Yeats praised in his best of Irish fiction in the Bookman in October 1895. The other short stories—"The Game Hen," "Baubie Clark," and "Weeds"—were combined with "Flitters" and published together by Macmillan in 1881. Hartley also translated a French children's story, No Relations (1880), and tried her hand at a typical Victorian moral tale, the novella A Singer's Story (1885). Although published over thirteen years, her actual writing occurred primarily during an eight-year period. Afterward, she wrote only one public piece: a scathing, uneven contribution solicited by Horace Plunkett—a politician, reformer, and colleague of her husband—for the Recess Committee of 1895, a Parliamentary committee assembled to develop local reforms in Ireland.

Kahn analyzes Hartley's fiction as social commentary as much as literature. This focus is especially useful because of the scarcity of other Irish realist novels of that time. Kahn traces Hartley's development as a political and social writer. Despite the lack of primary documents, Kahn works to reconstruct this notably private author's life, scrutinizing Hartley's background to illuminate her characters and themes. It would be difficult to read her work, as Kahn demonstrates, without acknowledging the importance Hartley placed on education, particularly women's education, which she considered grossly inadequate. An equally important influence on Hartley's outlook on life was the mixed marriage of her parents: her mother was a Protestant and her father a Catholic. Her characters' actions often reflect these cultural and religious tensions, usually to the detriment of plot development, as Kahn points out. Aside from familial relationships, Hartley scrutinizes quotidian Catholic and Protestant interactions in the late nineteenth century. Accordingly, she emphasizes the realities rather than the genesis of this politically volatile era—an unconventional perspective in this period.

Throughout the book, Kahn also refers to the Recess Committee Notes written by Hartley years after the publication of her final novel. She emphasizes that these rather acerbic, sometimes vitriolic minutes are atypical of Hartley's writing. Because Hartley's husband committed her involuntarily to a mental institution in 1910, Kahn theorizes that whatever mental illness she suffered influenced this last piece of writing. Hartley's views, as developed in her fiction, were certainly unusual for her time, and Kahn notes that she was especially sensitive to criticism—hence her desire to remain anonymous. Yet the disintegration of the astute, insightful writer of social realism into the ranting, bitter author in the Recess Committee Notes seems incomprehensible. Kahn notes that she stopped writing in 1882, the year she married a Protestant husband. Kahn further speculates that Hartley's seven-year delay in having a child; her professor husband's ill health, uneven finances, and problems with alcohol; or the religiously mixed marriage itself could have contributed to her mental instability. None of these...