Life
?1860-1911; 4th dg. Alexander O’Conor Eccles of Ballingard House,
Co. Roscommon, JP and founder of Roscommon Messenger; ed. Upton
Hall, Birkenhead, Praris and Germany; prose writer, translator, and journalist
of excellent reputation [?O’Donoghue]; 2 poems in Irish Monthly,
July 1887 and Mar. 1905; The Rejuvenation of Miss Semaphore, a
farcical novel (London: Jarrold & Sons 1897); Aliens of the West
(London: Cassell 1904); The Matrimonial Lottery (London: Eveleigh
Nash 1906). JMC IF
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Notes
Stephen Brown, Ireland in Fiction (Dublin:
Maunsel 1919), calls her a dg. of A. O’C. Eccles of Ballingard Hse.,
Co. Roscommon; Irish periodicals; went to London, prominent journalist
there; Rejuvenation of Miss Semaphore, clever and witty; d. 1911; Aliens
of the West (Cassell 1904), 351pp. [6 stories rep. from Amer. Eccl.
Rev. (Catholic)] and Pall Mall Magazine, scene is Toomevara near
Shannon estuary; called a serious and earnest book canvassing miseries
of class distinctions, social and religious cleavage, disasters of education
above one’s station, also pathetic death of peasant boy, and loyalty
of servant girl to fallen fortunes of the family.
Justin McCarthy, gen. ed., Irish Literature (Washington: University of America 1904); a dg. Alexander O’Conor Eccles of Ballingarde [sic] House, Co. Roscommon; ed. Upton Hall, Birkenhead, Paris and Germany; as Hal Godfrey wrote The Rejuvenation of Miss Semaphore, humours; extensive periodical contribs. JMC selects ‘King William, A chronicle of Toomevara’, from Pall Mall Gazette’, a narrative much in Hiberno-English dialect [beginning, ‘In Toomevara our political opinions are strong and well defined, and we express them freely. [PARA] Such feuds, however, as that between mrs Macfarlane, who kept the refreshment room at the railway station, and Mr James O’Brien, the station-master, were rare, since usualy Catholics and Protestants lived on very neighbourly terms in our part of Ireland ... he ... a man of pronounced Celtic type she ... cold and superior and implacably in the right.]
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Princess Grace Irish Library (Monaco)