Life
fl.1894 [pseud. ‘Edan Lyall’]; born and ed. Brighton;
Won by Waiting (1879); Doreen, The Story of a Singer (1894),
a novel dealing with Irish political rights and dedicated to Gladstone
in ‘gratitude and reverence’; supplied 18 books to Mudie’s
circulating library list. IF SUTH
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Notes
Stephen Brown, Ireland in Fiction (Dublin: Maunsel 1919),
lists Doreen [1894], concerning the dg. of an old ’48 man
and Fenian, who backs Home Rule with her singing; romantic lot, on the
side of the nationalist cause; Donal Moore, a nationalist MP, is a striking
character; novel ded. to Gladstone.
John Sutherland, The Longman Companion to Victorian Fiction (Harlow: Longmans 1988), lists Doreen, The Story of a Singer (1894) and calls it an unusually powerful novel dealing with Fenian agitations, opening in 1870, and involving a love between Max Hereford (English visitor to southern Ireland), and Doreen O’Ryan; they separate after her father’s tragic death after long imprisonment because she refused to stop singing for Ireland; later, a liberal MP, he becomes enlightened; Gladstone’s speeches figure centrally, and the novel is dedicated to him in ‘gratitude and reverence.’
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Princess Grace Irish Library (Monaco)