Selina Bunbury

01 January 1802 - 08 September 1882

SB was a versatile author of both fiction and non-fiction, much of it set in her native Ireland although she later made her home in England. Her writings, published over six decades in the mid-nineteenth century, display a loving and respectful preoccupation with female characters and themes; none of them has been much valued by critics.Her oeuvre includes about ten travel narratives (some autobiographical, some fictionalized to varying degrees, covering many countries of Europe), about a dozen volumes of religious children's and young adults' fiction, dozens of stories in periodicals (usually anonymous, which makes their number difficult to estimate), two historical biographies, at least five fictional or semi-autobiographical early works set in Ireland, and a handful of other novels, short-story collections, and miscellaneous writings including Protestant polemic.

OCLC WorldCat.

Milestones

1802

SB was apparently born at Kilsaran Rectory, near the village of Castlebellingham in Louth, Ireland.

Her birthplace is recorded in the British Census of 1881 as Shrewsbury in England. Yet not only does the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography say she was born at Kilsaran House; she also published a book about Ireland as A Visit to my Birthplace.

“FamilySearch Internet Genealogy Service”. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Blain, Virginia, Patricia Clements, and Isobel Grundy, editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford, 1990.

Loeber, Rolf, and Magda Loeber. A Guide to Irish Fiction 1650-1900. Four Courts, 2006.

204

1821

SB 's first published work, A Visit to My Birthplace (one of a number of her early books to deal with Protestant society in Ireland) is said to have appeared this year, though only later editions are known.

Matthew, Henry Colin Gray, Brian Harrison, and Lawrence Goldman, editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

“Selina Bunbury”. The Irish Book Lover, Vol. VII, No. 6, pp. 105 - 7.

105

Brown, Stephen J. Ireland in Fiction. Burt Franklin, 1970.

1843

Coombe Abbey: An Historical Tale of the Reign of James the First, a story about the kidnapping of the young Elizabeth of Bohemia that was planned to accompany the gunpowder plot of 1605, became SB 's best known work.

OCLC WorldCat.

Schneider, Lynn. Email about Selina Bunbury’s Coombe Abbey to Tamara De Dominicis.

8 September 1882

SB died at Percy House in Cheltenham, the home of her nephew . She was buried in the cemetery there with a memorial erected over her grave.