Helena Kelleher Kahn

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...

The response to Laffan's second novel was more positive than to her first, and it sold well. The Saturday Review declared [t]here was much that was clever in the author's earlier novel of...

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.

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...

Overlooking the weak management of the plot because the main aim of the author is a social picture, the Athenæum called Christy Carew a truthful account of Dublin society told in such a way that...

Ismay's Children has been relatively ignored in recent Laffan studies: only Helena Kelleher Kahn has addressed it. She reads it as a politicalallegory of Ireland under English rule, intended to put before English readers some...

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...