Jack Kenmare goes to his uncle’s place in Connaught, and has a pleasant time in company with his cousins. He becomes engaged to one of them, who writes stories. Several of these are given. An excellent moral tale, and a glimpse of happy Irish life in a country house. The political point of view is not Nationalist: neither is it hostile to Ireland.
JEBB, Horsley.
⸺ SPORT ON IRISH BOGS. Pp. 192. (Everett). 1s. Paper. 1910.
Farcical Irish stories by a Londoner who occasionally shoots and fishes in Ireland. Peasants made grotesque, but Author has no hostile intentions. Nondescript dialect. “A Home in Calery” is quite different, and makes very pleasant reading. “Sister Eugenia” is an agreeable, melodramatic story.
JESSOP, George H. B. in Ireland; ed. at Trinity. Went to U.S.A., 1873. Edited Judge (1884), and contributed to other humorous papers. Wrote some very successful plays. He died in 1915 at Hampstead. Another of his novels is The Emergency Men, a novel in which he pictures the land troubles in Ireland from the anti-popular point of view.
⸺ GERALD FRENCH’S FRIENDS. Pp. 240. (Longmans). Well illustr. 1889.
Six stories reprinted from the Century Magazine, 1888. Gerald, a spendthrift son of good family, takes to journalism, and goes to San Francisco. There he meets various types of his fellow-countrymen, and the stories are about these. “All the incidents related in this book are based on fact, and several of them are mere transcripts from actual life.... The purpose is to depict a few of the most characteristic types of the native Celt of the original stock, as yet unmixed in blood, but modified by new surroundings and a different civilization.” An excellent work, and perhaps the Author’s best.
⸺ WHERE THE SHAMROCK GROWS. (Murray & Evenden). 3s. 6d. 1911.
A rather commonplace story. The characters are mostly of the squireen class, notably the drunken Mat O’Hara. There are two love stories, both having happy conclusions, to which the racehorse Liscarrick largely contributes. “The paper is poor and the binding tawdry.”—(I.B.L.) “The writer has only put on record that part of his experience which can be reconciled with conceptions derived from Lever.”—(Irish Times).