Scene: a wild and poverty-stricken district in Clare. A view of the bad days of the ’eighties by one to whom the Land League stands for “lawlessness and crime.” The people are depicted as half-savage. The story is a gloomy one, full of assassinations and the other dark doings of the Land League. The picture it gives of an Irish mother will jar harshly on the feelings of most Irishmen. The Irish dialect is all but a caricature. Yet the story met with an immediate and extraordinary success. In a vol. publ. by Mr. Gladstone in 1892, Special Aspects of the Irish Question, he says of Hurrish, “She has made present to her readers, not as an abstract proposition, but as a living reality, the estrangement of the people of Ireland from the law.... As to the why of this alienation, also, she has her answer (p. 309 of first ed.), ‘The old long-repented sin of the stronger country was the culprit.’ She thinks there was a sin, a deep sin, and (so I construe her) an inveterate sin, but a sin now purged by repentance.”
⸺ WITH ESSEX IN IRELAND. Pp. 298. (Methuen). 6s. [1890]. New ed., 1902.
A narrative of Essex’s Irish expedition, 1599, purporting to be related by his private secretary. Pictures Elizabethan barbarity in warfare. It has a strange element of the uncanny and supernatural. Hints at the spell that Ireland casts over her conquerors. Written in quaint Elizabethan English which never lapses into modernness.
⸺ GRANIA: the Story of an Island. (Smith, Elder). 3s. 6d., and 2s. 6d. [1892].
A sympathetic picture of life in the Aran Islands, where existence is a struggle against the elements. There are typical characters, such as Honor, the saintly and patient, with her eyes on the life beyond, and Grania, young and impetuous, and longing for joy as she battles with the endless privations of her stern lot, and the lover, Irish alike in his goodness and in his vices. The success of this book exceeded even that of Hurrish. Swinburne thought it “just one of the most exquisite and perfect works of genius in the language” (in a letter).
⸺ MAELCHO. Pp. 418. (Methuen). 1s. (N.Y.: Appleton). 1.50. [1895]. 1905.
Gloomy picture of misery and devastation during the Desmond rebellion. An English boy escaping from a night attack finds refuge in a Connemara glen among the native Irish (O’Flaherties), hideous wretches of savage appearance and uncouth tongue. Then comes a confused account of the melodramatic struggles of Fitzmaurice and his wild followers against the English, noble, steady, and civilized. There is a vague impression throughout of an Irish race without ideals or religion, inevitably losing ground, moved by no impulse but love of strife and cringing superstition. But the cruelties of the English at the time are not in any way slurred over.
⸺ TRAITS AND CONFIDENCES. Pp. 272. (Methuen) 6s. 1897.
A volume of stories and sketches, founded for the most part on fact. Some are autobiographical episodes of childhood. There is an incident of ’98, an incident of the Land War, and two episodes of Irish history, the story of Geroit Mor, Earl of Kildare, and that of Art Macmurrough, told in vivid, romantic style without political bias. Again, there are extremely interesting “memories” of the Famine of 1846-7. On pages 142-150 is a remarkable description of Connemara. The story-telling is full of vivacity and picturesqueness, reminding one of French storytellers, such as Daudet. The book is filled from first to last with Ireland.