Life
1828-1862 [var. Fitzjames]; Co. Cork and raised in Castleconnell, Co.
Limerick; emigrated to US; wrote in manner of Poe; prolific contrib. to
journals; enjoyed a success with his play The Gentleman from Ireland
(1854); died of Civil War wounds sustained at battle of Bloomery Gap;
issued The Diamonds and Other Stories (1887). PI IF DIW MKA
JMC OCAL OCIL.
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Works
William Winter, ed., The Poems and Stories of Fitz-james O’Brien
(Boston 1881); Michael Hayes, ed. and intro., The fantastic tales of
Fitz-James O’Brien (London: Calder 1977), 149pp. [contains The
Diamond Lens’; ‘The lost room’; ‘What was it?’;
‘The wondersmith’; ‘Seeing the World’; ‘The Pot
of Tulips’; ‘The Dragon Fang Possessed by the Conjurer Piou-Lu’.
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Criticism
Francis Wolle, Fitz-james O’Brien: A Literary Bohemian of the
Eighteen-fifties (Colorado 1944) 309pp
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Notes
D. J. O’Donoghue, Poets of Ireland (Dublin: Hodges Figgis
1912) lists The Poems and Stories of F. O’Brien, [collected
by his friend William Winter] (Boston 1881); he is represented by 2 pieces
in Hayes’s Ballads.
Stephen Brown, Ireland in Fiction (Dublin: Maunsel 1919), lists The Poems and Stories of Fitzjames O’Brien (1881); The Diamond Lens and Other Stories (London: Downey & Co. 1887).
Stephen Brown, S.J., Guide to Books on Ireland (Dublin: Talbot 1912), cites him as author of play, A Gentleman from Ireland NY 1854), set in London, with characters Gerald Fitzmaurice and Miss Clover. The same is called ‘his most notable play’ in James D. Hart, Oxford Companion to American Literature (OUP 1983).
Brian McKenna, Irish Literature, 1800-1875: A Guide to Information Sources (Detroit: Gale Research Co. 1978), cites contribs. to Nation, Dublin University Magazine, Irishman, and Cork Magazine [dates supplied; bibl. as supra.
Patrick Rafroidi, Irish Literature in English (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe 1980), Vol 2 [as supra].
Justin McCarthy, ed., Irish Literature (Washington: Catholic Univ. of America 1904), gives extract from "The Diamond Lens", fiction, and "Loch Ina", poetry. See also under under ‘Street Songs and Ballads’ (Irish Literature, 1904), which reprints "Molly Muldoon", written about 1850 [and] sometimes ascribed to Fitzjames O’Brien: ‘Molly Muldoon was an Irish girl, / And as fine a one / As you’d look upon / In the cot of a peasant or the hall of an earl. / Her teeth were white, though not of pearl [...] Now Molly Muldoon liked Jemmy O’Hare [...] An Irish courtship’s short and sweet / It’s sometimes foolish and indiscreet [during the service the bridegroom’s ‘piercing eye sometime awful espied!’ and the bride laid her eyes on the bridegroom no more!’ - until the day a an American letter is brought to the priest [saying] ‘not in her karacter, yer Riv’rence, a flaw [...] but I saw, God forgive her, a hole in her stocking!’ the moral conclusion disparagates a love that would be upset by a ‘broken stocking’.
There is a website at site at http://www.creative.net/~alang/lit/horror/fob.sht. (April 1999).
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Princess Grace Irish Library (Monaco)