Life
1853-?; b. Lismore, Co. Waterford; ed. Presentation Nuns, Waterford, and
by Miss Lizzie Fitzsimon (later Mrs. Walsh); emigrated to America and
ed. Providence Visitor, Rhode Island; issued Neighbours
(1900), in which the longest story, “Miss Dunne’s monument”,
relates the heartless jealousy of a returned female emigrant who spends
her ill-gotten fortune on a Celtic gravestone, but then survives long
enough to endure the humiliation of the workhouse; in The Lost Land
(1901, 1907), a historical novel set in 1798 [err. Cromwellian times],
the idealism of United Irishman, Thad Lombard, is tragically extinguished
in a Munster town where ‘no life stir[s] but the ugly life born of
stagnation and rottenness’ which still ‘press[es] with heaviness
and hopelessness on thoughtful souls in Irish towns today’; also Innisdoyle Neighbours (1920); moved to the Isle of Man and later
returned to America. IF JMC OCIL
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References
Irish Literature, Justin McCarthy, ed. (Washington:
University of America 1904); Julia Crotty [sic]; ‘[passed her] childhood
in lifeless atmosphere of an Irish town where she received impressions
rendered with sometimes appalling faithfulness in Neighbours and The Lost Land; has lived for some time in America; one of few since
Carleton to show fearless realism in her portrayal of Irish character
but that does not mean that she does not love her people and deal tenderly
with them as well’; extract from Neighbours.
Ireland in Fiction, ed. Stephen Brown (Dublin: Maunsel 1919), calls Neighbours ‘pictures of very unlovely aspects of life in a small stagnant town’
There is an extract from Neighbours (1900) in The Faces of Ireland, ed. Brian Walker et al. (1992), though without a biographical notice.
Belfast Public Library hold Neighbours (1901 [?2nd edn.]); The Lost Land (1901); Innisdoyle Neighbours (1920) [Qry].
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