Helena Kelleher Kahn

In her youth ML also spent time in rural Ireland, visiting relatives in County Tipperary. Tipperary frequently appears in her fiction: Helena Kelleher Kahn argues that the fictional Peatstown and Darraghstown of Hogan, M.P...

Helena Kelleher Kahn speculates that ML lived in Paris for a short time: she bases this argument on Laffan's fluency in the language (which was certainly not due to her convent education), and she finds...

Some sources, like A Guide to Irish Fiction 1650-1900 and the OCLC WorldCat, attribute to ML a two-volume novel, King, or Knave?, which appeared in 1877 as by the author of two earlier...

According to scholar Helena Kelleher Kahn , the first American edition of ML 's realist novel Christy Carew appeared in 1878, although standard library catalogues record no edition before 1880.

At the age of twenty-five ML published in Fraser's Magazine the anonymous article Convent Boarding-Schools for Young Ladies, an attack on the Catholic system of women's education.

Richard Bentley published, anonymously, the edition of ML 's Christy Carew which is reckoned by most scholars (though not by Helena Kelleher Kahn ), to be the first.

A Singer's Story tells how Hester, a middle-class evangelical Protestant, falls on hard times, but is inspired by a biblical text to support herself as a singer of sacred music. On marrying a clergyman, she...

Set largely in Laffan's home town of Dublin, Hogan, M.P. captures an Ireland whose growing Catholic middle class is challenging the long empowered Protestant ascendancy. The action takes place three or four years before...

In this novel ML returns to the controversy of Irish Home Rule so thoroughly treated in Hogan, M.P., putting criticisms of it into the mouths of middle-class, Protestant Irish residents. The attorney Mr Perry...

Laffan returns once more to the subject of female education (both Christy and Esther are convent-educated), but in Christy Carew the matter is caught up in that of women's constrained life-choices, generally, after they finish...

ML 's treatment of adultery and prostitution in this tale is highly unusual. Though Honor Walsh is an adulterer, she is cleanly to the last degree in her person and habits, active and hardworking

Again ML blends empathy with judgement. She evokes working-class freedoms and pleasures denied to the middle class (a highly unusual approach at a time when the poor were often seen as an inferior race). By...

ML allusively published Ismay's Children, which was her last novel to see print in volume form—it may have been previously serialised—and probably written years before this.

Weeds drew little response. In Ireland in Fiction, 1916, Stephen J. Brown denigrated it as a [l]urid and revolting story of conspiracy and murder. This contrasts with Helena Kelleher Kahn 's assessment of...

Helena Kelleher Kahn claimed this work was that of a woman depressed enough to consider taking her own life. The unpublished manuscript (which is held at the Cambridge University Library ) marks a subdued...