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...
Family and Intimate relationships
May Laffan
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
Literary responses
May Laffan
This book sold well, and remains ML
's most successful novel.
Kahn, Helena Kelleher. Late Nineteenth-Century Ireland’s Political and Religious Controversies in the Fiction of May Laffan Hartley. ELT, 2005.
72
Some initial reviews were favourable, but most afforded Hogan, M.P. at best lukewarm praise. The Protestant, Unionist Dublin University Magazine declared that though...
Literary responses
May Laffan
For such a short piece this has been reviewed extensively; its popularity endured until the end of the nineteenth century. The Spectator said that [n]o work of fiction that we have seen for a long...
Kahn, Helena Kelleher. Late Nineteenth-Century Ireland’s Political and Religious Controversies in the Fiction of May Laffan Hartley. ELT, 2005.
177
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...
Textual Features
May Laffan
Hogan, M.P. opens with a scene in the convent of St Swithin's, by which ML
fictionalizes the same criticisms she had articulated in Convent Boarding-Schools for Young Ladies. The young women's education is solely...
Textual Features
May Laffan
Jill Brady Hampton
argues that Flitters's action is futile and the ending bleak. The reader is left with the two big, strong Irish men surviving to carry on their tradition of drunkenness and irresponsibility and...
Timeline
No timeline events available.
Texts
Hampton, Jill Brady. “Ambivalent Realism: May Laffans Flitters, Tatters, and the CounsellorNew Hibernia Review, Vol.
12
, No. 2, 2008, pp. 127-41.
Hampton, Jill Brady. Voices Outside the Irish Renaissance. Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, 1999.