Life
[?-?; pseud. “Emelobie de Celtis”]; works incl. The Pale and the Septs (1876); Leixlip Castle: A Romance of the Penal Days of 1690 (1883); Ill-won Peerages, or An Unhallowed Union (1884); Art MacMurrough O’Kavanagh
(1885); ‘a Dublin lady’, acc. Brown, who adds: O’Byrne’s are the heroes of her works of 1883 and 1884,
prefaces to which extol the superior virtues of the Gael’ [IF]. IF
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Quotations
‘“The tree shall be known by its fruit.” Was it from Dublin, Kildare, and Meath, populated by the mean descendants of Cromwellian roundheads, regicides, murders, unprincipled perjurers, thieves, London absconded clerks, scavengers and horseboys, ill-conditioned, voracious adventurers, bible mongers, with God on their lips and Satan in their bosoms, that sympathy with a noble cause could be expected? Was it from the cautious, mercenary posterity of canny Scotch planters in the North that aid could have been hoped for? Was I from a class of aristocracy whose patents of nobility were not the guerdon of fair chivalry or won by high deeds of honour and renown, but the vile badge of state livery, the dearly earned wages of the minion, lacquey, parasite, and factotum, hired to any ignoble service required by the patrons, the parvenus whose titles were founded upon confiscations, blood, and stockjobbing, whose proudest boast was their ephemeral notoriety, too often begotten of infamy, and their acme of bliss to bask and revel in the sunshine of castle patronage and great men’s smiles - that aught of noble hereditary instincts, generous impulses, the heirlooms of freeborn minds, could be looked for?’ (Q. source; quoted in Eileen Reilly, ‘Fiction’s Histories and Histories Fictions’ [unpub. paper of 1996].)
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References
Stephen Brown, Ireland in Fiction: A Guide to Irish Novels, Tales, Romances and Folklore [Pt. I] (Dublin: Maunsel 1919), lists The Pale and the Septs, 2 vols. (Dublin: Gill [1876]) [steady advance of English in all its cruelty]; Leixlip Castle (Dublin: Gill [1883]) [set c.1690]; Ill-Won Peerages, or An Unhallowed Union (Dublin: Gill 1884), 716pp. [rebellion from Kilcullen to Vinegar Hill with all noteworthy personages of period canvassed]; Art MacMurrough O’Kavanagh (Dublin: Gill [1885]), 706pp. [full account of life, inside and outside of Pale]; The Court of Rath Croghan (Dublin: Gill 1887), 465pp.
[Norman invasion]; Lord Roche’s Daughters of Fermoy (Dublin: Sealy, Bryers; NY: Pratt 1892), 344pp. [Cromwellian invasion]; employs idiom such as ‘yclept’. (Some remarks as in Life, supra.)
Belfast Public Library holds Art MacMurrough O’Cavanagh (1885); Ill-Won Peerages (1884).
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