⸺ THE PEARL OF LISNADOON. Pp. 126. (Elliot Stock). 1886.
Scene: Killarney in the time following O’Connell’s imprisonment. Aims to prove that the landlords were extremely ill-treated, and that the Irish are uncivilised, and more or less savage. Strong Protestant bias. Usual pictures of agrarian crime.
ERVINE, St. John G. Born Belfast, 1883. Has published four plays, three of which have been successfully acted at the Abbey Theatre. Hopes to publish a new novel, Changing Winds, in the near future.
⸺ EIGHT O’CLOCK, and Other Stories. Pp. 128. (Maunsel). 2s. 6d. 1913.
Reprinted from various periodicals. Six out of the seventeen are Irish in subject. There is the sketch of Clutie John, a queer old North of Irelander, whose profession is “fin’in’ things.” “The Well of Youth,” a fantastic and humorous story about the Well of St. Brigid in the Vale of Avoca—told in North of Ireland dialect! In “The Fool,” John O’Moyle, a little “astray in his mind,” gives an English tourist some eye-opening facts about the condition of peasant farms (Catholic and Protestant) in Donegal. “The Match” is a satire on match-making. In “Discontent” a young Antrim boy on Lurigedan tells of the hunger of the country-bred for the excitements of town life. “The Burial” is concerned with life in Ballyshannon. Clever and finished. The remainder deal with English life.
⸺ MRS. MARTIN’S MAN. Pp. 312. (Maunsel). 6s. 1915.
Theme: the triumph of an injured wife over a situation that would have finally wrecked the lives of most women—her desertion by an unfaithful husband, and, still harder to face, his return after sixteen years, a worthless drunken lout, to live with her again. Mrs. Martin is the book, which is both a careful character study and a page of life-philosophy. But the minor characters are good—the Presbyterian clergyman, verbose and self-sufficient (a very unfavourable portrait), the canting and narrow-minded Henry Mahaffy, and Mrs. Martin’s Man himself. There is a somewhat drab background of lower middle-class life in Ulster (Ballyreagh (= Donaghadee) and Belfast). A very remarkable book that has had a deservedly great success. As for its moral aspect, the Author is against cant, hypocrisy, and intolerance; he is somewhat contemptuous towards religion: he is never salacious, but there is an occasional sensuousness in his treatment of a painful subject.
ESLER, Mrs. Erminda Rentoul. Daughter of Rev. Alexander Rentoul, M.D., D.D., of Manor Cunningham, Co. Donegal. Lives in London, and contributes to Cornhill, Chambers’s, Quiver, Sunday at Home, and many other periodicals. Author of The Way of Transgressors (1890), Youth at the Prow, The Awakening of Helena Thorpe.
⸺ THE WAY THEY LOVED AT GRIMPAT: Village Idylls. (Sampson Low). 1893.