Helena Kelleher Kahn

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.

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

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.

Helena Kelleher Kahn terms this the most complex and melodramatic of ML 's short stories, praising it—along with Flitters, Tatters and the Counsellor and Baubie Clark—as noticeably different to run-of-the-mill Victorian fiction about...

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.

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...

Her mother, born Ellen Sarah Fitzgibbon , was probably the niece of Gerald Fitzgibbon , Master of Chancery in Ireland. Ellen's family was originally from County Limerick—but had settled in Dublin before her lifetime—and...

John Ruskin praised the pure and straightforward truth of this story, but added: Miss Laffan knows and sees the children of her own country thoroughly, but she has no clear perceptions of the Scotch...

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...

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 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...

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...

Walter Hartley is still remembered for his work on the spectra of the chemical elements. He had suffered from severe asthma since before the marriage. There is some debate about his religious beliefs: Jill Brady Hampton

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...

In the early 1900s ML suffered a nervous breakdown, the cause of which is unknown. Family members described her behaviour at the time as eccentric and temperamental; they also noted that she drank whiskey...