Life
1845-1909; b. Cahirmoyle, Co. Limerick; dg. of William Smith O’Brien,
with whom she lived in Brussels after his return from deportation and
exile in Tasmania and America in 1854; became deaf; dedicated herself
to human rights of Irish emigrants travelling to America, actually making
the Atlantic crossing. 1881; her pamphlets on such conditions aboard White
Star Line reprinted in Pall Mall Gazette, (6 May 1881), resulting
in Board of Trade investigation and stricter controls; opposed Coercion
Act, 1881; supported Land League; contrib. The Nation and United
Ireland [var. United Irishman]; knew Aubrey de Vere, John Boyle
O’Reilly, and later Douglas Hyde; converted to Catholicism out of
sympathy with the Irish peasant, 1887; contrib. to The Nation,
six poems in The Irish Monthly (Mar. 1879-May 1896); one in Dublin
University Review, Nov. 1885; her novels include Light and Shade
(1878), in which Lord Dunallan is warned of a intended Fenian assassination
in return for his unsolicited kindness to a blind fiddler; also a play,
A Tale of Venice (1881); there is a memoir by Stephen Gwynn (1909).
PI JMC DNB IF DBIV DIW DIH SUTH OCIL.
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Works
Dominic’s Trials (1870); Light and Shade (London: Kegan
Paul 1878); A Tale of Venice (London 1881); Lyrics, (London
1887); Cahirmoyle, of the Old Home (Limerick 1888); Stephen Lucius
Gwynn, ed., with prefatory memoir, Charlotte Grace O’Brien, Selections
from her Writings and Correspondence (Dublin: Maunsel 1909).
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Criticism
See Mary Cullen and Maria Luddy, Women, Power, and Consciousness in
19th century. Ireland (Attic 1996).
James H. Murphy, Catholic Fiction and Social Reality in Ireland, 1873-1922 (Conn: Greenwood Press 1997), Part I: ‘Upper Middle-Class Fiction 1873-1890, passim, esp. ftn.18, p.24.
W. P. Ryan, The Irish Literary Revival (1894), p.118.
Dominic Daly, The Young Douglas Hyde (1974), n., 217.
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Notes
Justin McCarthy, ed., Irish Literature (Washington: Catholic Univ.
of America 1904), remarks, ‘her efforts to improve lot of female
emigrants from Ireland to this country were most successful, as the accommodation
now given them aboard the steamers testifies’; McCarthy selects “Bog
Cotton on the Red Bog” [‘... Riding on her snow-maned horse,
the gold-haired fairy queen/Oh, I have seen! I have seen!’]; “Song”
in imitation of 17th century Celtic writers [‘Art thou sad-eyed Deirdré
who mourns the Red Branch Knights ...’]; no prose given here.
John Cooke, The Dublin Book of Irish Verse (Dublin: Hodges Figgis 1909), gives bio-dates; selects “Sonnet” [‘When the heart presses hard against the bars / And all the aching senses seem to reach ... the sonnet ... draws near to us, as some soft-handed leech / giving our thoughts deliverance ..’); “The River” [‘Poor Mick was trotting on to the town / The side car under him going ...’ [he drowns, mavrone]).
Stephen Brown, Ireland in Fiction (Dublin: Maunsel 1919), lists Dominick’s Trials: An Irish Story (Gall & Inglis [1870]), 120pp. [a tract telling of the conversion of the title char. to the Bible, his losing his job as scarecrow to a farmer, his conversion of his sister, their being sent together to a Protestant orphanage, after which ‘they never lost an opportunity of turning any poor benighte Roman Catholic to the light of God’s truth’]; Light and Shade, 2 vols. (Kegan, Paul 1878) [set on the Shannon, with a double love-story, and containing mater ‘grathered fro the lips of men who had been actors in the Fenian rising’, acc. to Stephen Gwynn, who writes: ‘violent, even melodramatic, in incident, it lacks the power of characterisation, but has many pasages of beauty …’].
John Sutherland, The Longman Companion to Victorian Fiction (Longmans 1988; rep. 1989), remarks that she passed most of her life in Limerick, where her uncle was a baronet; active in Nationalist politics and the Gaelic League; converted to Catholicism in 1887; effect on improving conditions of Irish women emigrating to US; Dominick’s Trials (1870) and Light and Shade (1878), the latter dealing with 1867, and containing a protest against the conditions in Mountjoy Prison; ends with hero and heroine carrying to America their ‘hatred of English law and passionate love of Ireland. BL 13.
COPAC lists Bessie Field: a cottage story (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge; NY: Pott, Young & Co. [1878]), 104pp.; Charlotte Grace O’Brien: Selections from Her Writings and Correspondence, with a memoir by Stephen Gwynn (Dublin: Maunsel 1909), 231pp.; Gipsy Marion: A Story of the New Forest (London: Gall & Inglis [1895]), [iii], 87pp., 2 pls.; Light and shade, 2 vols. (London: C. Kegan Paul & Co. 1878), 8vo.; Owen Netherby’s Choice (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge [1876]) , 60pp’; A tale of Venice: A Drama, and Lyrics (Dublin: M. H. Gill & Son 1880), [1-5] 6-138, [2]pp.; Wild flowers of the Undercliff, Isle of Wight (London: L. Reeve 1881), vi, 143pp.
Eggeling (Catalogue No. 44) lists Oliver Dale (Gardner, Darton 1898), rep., 109pp.
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Princess Grace Irish Library (Monaco)