The Story of Ireland

With an Introductory Chapter by Helen Edith Sichel

Emily Lawless

• Publisher: Read & Co. History
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781528718646
• eBook ISBN: 9781528791724
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Irish History
• Index: History

"The Story of Ireland" is a 1887 work by Emily Lawless that offers the reader a fantastic overview of Irish history. The Hon. Emily Lawless (1845–1913) was an Irish historian, gardener, poet, entomologist, and novelist of the early modern period. Contents include: "Primeval Ireland", "The Legends and the Legend Makers", "Pre-Christian Ireland", "St Patrick the Missionary", "The First Irish Monasteries", "St Columba and the Western Church", "The Northern Scourge", "Brian of the Tribute", "From Brian to Strongbow", "The Anglo-Norman Invasion", "Henry II in Ireland", "Effects of the Anglo-Norman Invasion", etc. Highly recommended for those with an interest in Ireland and its colourful history. Other notable works by Lawless include: "A Chelsea Householder" (1882), "A Millionaire's Cousin" (1885), and "Ireland" (1885). Read & Co. History is proudly republishing this insightful classic now in a new edition complete with an introductory chapter by Helen Edith Sichel.

EMILY LAWLESS

By Helen Edith Sichel

Last October there passed out from among us one of our few women-poets, Emily Lawless, Irishwoman first, and nil the rest afterwards. All the rest includes a great deal: a writer of novels and of romance, an historian, a naturalist, a lover of science, a bold thinker. And in each of these many parts Emily Lawless won distinction; in her poems, in her writing of Irish romances, of Hurrish and of Grania, something stronger and more likely to endure.

If she was first an Irishwoman, it was not of the type usually accepted as representative, at least in England—the vague and mystical Celt, impetuous, unpractical, guided by forces outside reason. The mind of Emily Lawless was a concrete mind with a turn for affairs; with a man's business outlook, large and lucid, not over-concerned with detail ; still more with a gift for natural science, her 'ruling passion' from seven years old onwards, and for the methods of minute research. But under this fine and interesting terra firma there ran deeper than can plummet sound the unconscious currents of race—flashing here and there to the surface, when and how she herself knew not—persistent questionings of the unseen, gleams of intuition, a sudden brilliant vision of the past, a wild stirring of the blood, a passionate companionship with Irish earth and sea ; or—more rarely—tranquil pools of inspiration reflecting in their depths the things she brought from afar. Perhaps there are few people in whom the two strains of artist and of woman keep so distinctly alongside—seldom fusing, touching occasionally, yet without causing the conflict, the clash of emotions which has troubled so many creators. What disturbance she suffered from her gifts was nearly always intellectual, unless it were from the nervous stress of work. Her poetry flowed easily from her, was almost her pastime; and, until illness overtook her, the writing of her books gave her pleasure. This was the more remarkable because when she began her real career as a writer she was already forty-one, and had no spring of youth to help her.

Emily Lawless was born in Ireland in 1845. Her father was the third Lord Cloncurry, her mother the beautiful Miss Kirwan of Galway. Her great-grandfather, the first peer, was the famous opponent of the Union, twice imprisoned in the Tower—a born hero of romance, but a good administrator, clear-headed and beneficent, who united in himself some of the gifts that distinguished his great-granddaughter. He is good to read of amidst his picturesque doings with Ministers and patriots, with O'Connell and the rest, as chronicled by his son in his Life and Letters. And it was from his day and through his conversion that his family embraced the Protestant faith.

Emily Lawless spent the best parts of her childhood in the West of Ireland, in her mother's home and country; and Castle Hackett and County Galway and the haunted hill of Cruchmaa and the islands of Aran made up her land of enchantment, the country which every child creates for itself, but which this child found ready to her hand. The haunted hill belonged to her own family, it was a treasury of fairy-lore; and the moody, ever-changing Atlantic, with its strange voices of calm and storm, its wheeling sea-birds, its huge swelling stretches, its dark hiding-places amidst the cliffs and caves, its sounds and gullies rich in silver mackerel—that Atlantic peculiarly her own—was no less a magic playground full of things she could never know, full also of strange things—sea-creatures—which she could know, and early learned to dredge for. Her mother must have made part of all the romance. She; was beautiful with a kind of arresting beauty which lay largely in the harmony of her features, but her charm was not confined to any form, it was conveyed by her whole person. Slender, frail, sparkling, grace itself, full of movement and sympathy, even in old age Lady Cloncurry made many lovers, and in her youth she carried all before her. She and her husband left their eight children full liberty—to the four girls no less than the four boys. As soon as she was past babyhood Emily was allowed the run of the far-stretching grounds by herself, now on foot, now on the back of her pony. Yet even at this moment, when all her best joys were open-air joys, she had one other taste which was prophetic—a dominating love of fine language. Big words had such a fascination for her that when she could not get out she spent hours curled up among the bookshelves in her father's library, turning over heavy old volumes, Elizabethan plays and the like; getting off by heart long portions in which the sound of the words pleased her, and reciting them to whoever would listen. The meaning did not concern her, and the results were not altogether convenient. On one occasion, when she was eight years old, her father was giving a dinner to a party of sporting squires, jovial port-drinking gentlemen, and, proud of his little girl's achievements, he told her as she sat at dessert to get up and repeat one of her 'pieces.' She obeyed. But unfortunately her last 'piece' was from an Elizabethan play—the speech of an outraged husband to a faithless wife—and it had attracted her because of the grand sound of a word which ended each line of the passage. It was a term of insult, the most improper in the English language. She loudly declaimed her blank verse, rolling off her favourite word with gusto to the great bewilderment of the squires, till her father, at first speechless, recovered his presence of mind and with a 'Thank you, Emily; very nice, but that is enough,' put an end to her performance.

For the rest, from the outset, her life was that of a naturalist, greatly to the inconvenience of the nursery. Stray grasshoppers crawled on beds and carpets; an 'exceptionally clammy frog carried in a hot little hand till it could be carried no longer, was placed in the widely open neck frill of a younger brother, which presented itself as a suitable receptacle, from whence it rapidly travelled downhill over his entire remonstrating person.' But Emily Lawless's aspirations soon assumed more impressive proportions.

'Nine years old,' she says, 'has always seemed to me to be the really culminating moment, the true pinnacle of human ambition.' When she was that blessed age she inscribed, in a handwriting of quite incredible shakiness and illegibility, the names of three snail-shells, two butterflies, and four moths—copied out of Lardner's Cabinet Encyclopaedia, with spelling variations of her own—also of a limestone fossil, a piece of feldspar, a fragment of mica, a stone celt . . . and a piece of plum-pudding stone—set down as 'Conglomerate.' After which . . . she inscribed above the rest in a handwriting even more tottering . . . The Union of all the Sciences, by—her own name in full.

Her ambition soon took a definite shape—the discovery of 'some bird or quadruped "new to science,"' a modest aim by the side of which all schoolroom knowledge, more especially that of the frivolous arts, seemed a mere object of contempt. The new bird or quadruped was gradually transformed into a new butterfly o...

Table of contents

• EMILY LAWLESS
• PREFACE
• I
• II
• III
• IV
• V
• VI
• VII
• VIII
• IX
• X
• XI
• XII
• XIII
• XIV
• XV
• XVI
• XVII
• XVIII
• XIX
• XX
• XXI
• XXII
• XXIII
• XXIV
• XXV
• XXVI
• XXVII
• XXVIII
• XXIX
• XXX
• XXXI
• XXXII
• XXXIII
• XXXIV
• XXXV
• XXXVI
• XXXVII
• XXXVIII
• XXXIX
• XL
• XLI
• XLII
• XLIII
• XLIV
• XLV
• XLVI
• XLVII
• XLVIII
• XLIX
• L
• LI
• LII
• LIII
• LIV
• LV
• LVI
• LVII
• LVIII
• LIX
• AUTHORITIES