Helena Kelleher Kahn

Standard Name: Kahn, Helena Kelleher

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Family and Intimate relationships May Laffan
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
Health May Laffan
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
Kahn, Helena Kelleher. Late Nineteenth-Century Ireland’s Political and Religious Controversies in the Fiction of May Laffan Hartley. ELT, 2005.
67
and temperamental; they also noted that she drank whiskey...
Literary responses May Laffan
The response to Laffan's second novel was more positive than to her first, and it sold well.
Kahn, Helena Kelleher. Late Nineteenth-Century Ireland’s Political and Religious Controversies in the Fiction of May Laffan Hartley. ELT, 2005.
45, 135
qtd. in
Kirk, John Foster, and S. Austin Allibone, editors. A Supplement to Allibone’s Critical Dictionary of English Literature and British and American Authors. J. B. Lippincott, 1891, 2 vols.
The Saturday Review declared [t]here was much that was clever in the author's earlier novel of...
Literary responses May Laffan
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...
Literary responses May Laffan
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...
Literary responses May Laffan
Helena Kelleher Kahn terms this the most complex and melodramatic
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...
Literary responses May Laffan
John Ruskin praised the pure and straightforward truth
qtd. in
Kahn, Helena Kelleher. Late Nineteenth-Century Ireland’s Political and Religious Controversies in the Fiction of May Laffan Hartley. ELT, 2005.
175
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...
Literary responses May Laffan
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.
Brown, Stephen J. Ireland in Fiction. New Edition, Burt Franklin, 1970.
132
This contrasts with Helena Kelleher Kahn 's assessment of...
Literary responses May Laffan
Helena Kelleher Kahn claimed this work was that of a woman depressed enough to consider taking her own life.
Kahn, Helena Kelleher. Late Nineteenth-Century Ireland’s Political and Religious Controversies in the Fiction of May Laffan Hartley. ELT, 2005.
231
The unpublished manuscript (which is held at the Cambridge University Library ) marks a subdued...
Publishing May Laffan
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.
Helena Kelleher Kahn finds evidence that this work...
Textual Features May Laffan
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...
Textual Features May Laffan
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...
Textual Features May Laffan
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...
Textual Features May Laffan
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
Laffan, May. Flitters, Tatters, and the Counsellor, and Other Sketches. Macmillan, 1881.
105

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Texts

Kahn, Helena Kelleher. Late Nineteenth-Century Ireland’s Political and Religious Controversies in the Fiction of May Laffan Hartley. ELT, 2005.