Life of country gentry and peasantry in County Down. With the latter the Author is particularly effective, bringing out their characteristics with quiet “pawky” humour. Especially, there is Mrs. M’Killop and her wise saws. But the Colonel and his wife are also very well drawn. There is pathos as well as humour. Noteworthy also are the descriptions of sea-coast scenery, and the story of the fight on the “twalth”—(I.B.L.). It is a simple tale of lover’s misunderstandings. Religious strife is pictured with perhaps undue insistence.
⸺ TINKER’S HOLLOW. Pp. 336. (Arnold). 6s. 1912.
A charming and delicately-told love story, with a background of life among the Presbyterians (both the better class, and the peasantry and servants) near a small town in Co. Antrim. Shows an intimate and sympathetic knowledge of the people that furnishes the characters of the story. The dialect is perfectly reproduced. There is a pleasant picture of the bright and sunny Sally Bruce growing from girlhood into womanhood amid the dull austerity of Coole House, in the society of her two maiden aunts and her bachelor uncle. There are pleasant gleams of Northern humour, not a few gems of rustic philosophy, and vignettes of Antrim scenery. The human interest is, however, strongest of all.
⸺ THE BLIND SIDE OF THE HEART. Pp. 299. (Maunsel). 6s. 1915.
The story of Dick Sandford’s choice between his cousin Betty—English like himself—bright, charming, wholly of this world, and Ethne Blake whom he meets while on a visit to Ireland. The book is really a study, or rather an imaginative presentment of this strange, almost unearthly, figure as typifying the mystic, faery side of the Celtic temperament, and of the background of haunted Irish landscape and peasant fairy-lore, against which she moves. The vital difference in the two temperaments, Celt and Saxon, is suggested throughout. The peasantry of the remote mountain glens are pictured with sympathy and insight.
CROKER, Mrs. B. M., wife of Lieut.-Col. Croker, late Royal Munster Fusiliers; daughter of Rev. W. Sheppard, Rector of Kilgefin, Co. Roscommon; educated at Rockferry, Cheshire. She spent fourteen years in the East, whence the Eastern subjects of some of her novels. These number nearly forty. She resides for the most part in London and Folkestone.
⸺ A BIRD OF PASSAGE. Pp. 366. (Chatto & Windus). [1886.] New edition. 1903.
A love story, beginning in the Andamans. There is a lively picture of garrison life, including the clever portrait of the “leading lady” (and tyrant), Mrs. Creery. The lovers are separated by the scheming of an unsuccessful rival. The girl first lives a Cinderella life, with disagreeable relations in London, then is a governess, and finally (p. 256) goes to a relation in Ireland. Then there are amusing studies of Irish types—carmen (Larry Flood, with his famous “Finnigan’s mare”), and servants, and a family of broken-down gentry. Things come right in the end.
⸺ IN THE KINGDOM OF KERRY. (Chatto & Windus). 3s. 6d. 1896.