Nevertheless, the omission of books in the Irish language from a Guide to Irish Fiction remains an anomaly, one of the many anomalies produced by the historic causes that have all but destroyed the Irish language as the living speech of Ireland.
Dublin, September, 1915.
[1] A Guide to Books on Ireland, Part I. (Hodges & Figgis), 1912.
PREFACE TO A READERS GUIDE TO IRISH FICTION (1910).
The present Guide to Irish Fiction is intended by the Author as the first part of a work in which it is hoped to furnish notes on books of all kinds dealing with Irish subjects.
Before explaining the scope of this section of the work it may be well, in order to forestall wrong impressions, to say at once what it is not. In the first place, then, it does not lay claim to be a bibliography. By this I do not mean that I am content to be inaccurate or haphazard, but simply that I do not aim at exhaustive completeness. In the second place, it is not a catalogue of books by Irish writers. Lastly, it does not deal exclusively with books printed or published in Ireland.
The Author’s aim has been to get together and to print in a convenient form a classified list of novels, tales, &c. (whether by Irish or by foreign writers), bearing on Ireland—that is, depicting some phase of Irish life or some episode of Irish history—and to append to each title a short descriptive note.
Two things here call for some explanation, viz., the list of titles and the descriptive notes.
As to the former, I have, with some trifling exceptions, included everything that I have been able to discover, provided it came within the scope of the work, as indicated above. It has been thought well to do this, because a vast amount of fiction that, from an artistic or from any other point of view, is defective in itself may yet be valuable as a storehouse of suggestion, fact, and fancy for later and better writers. For was it not worthless old tales and scraps of half-mythical history that held the germs of “Hamlet” and “Macbeth,” “King Lear” and “Othello”? There remains, indeed a large class of novels and tales that, so far as one may judge, can serve no useful purpose. It may be thought that with such books the best course to pursue is to allow them to pass into merited oblivion. But it must be remembered that booksellers and publishers will naturally continue to push such books because it is their business to do so, and the public will continue to buy them because it has ordinarily no other means of knowing their contents than the publisher’s announcement, the title, or—the cover. A “Guide” would, therefore, surely shirk an important portion of its task if it excluded worthless books, and thereby failed to put readers on their guard.