Helena Kelleher Kahn

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...

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

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...

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...

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...

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 The unpublished manuscript (which is held at the Cambridge University Library ) marks a subdued...

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...

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...

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.

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...

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...