Blog, Politics

Shadow of a Century

Jean Grainger Shadow of a Century (2015)   Scarlett O’Hara, named by her romantic mother, after the Gone With The Wind character, is a journalist. Through her own romantic involvement that leads to her downfall (and the novel’s exposure of…

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Biography, Source, Women's History

A Lasting Literary Collaboration – Beyond the Grave

Ross might have been surprised had she known that after her death Somerville would go on to publish another seventeen books as collaborations between them. Six months dead, it seems, Ross sent a message through a medium to her partner: “You and I have not finished our work. Dear, we shall.” Later attempts to get her to manifest herself at spiritualist seances proved unsuccessful or inconclusive, yet she apparently collaborated willingly, even on the stories in Stray-aways, 1920, many of which involve spiritualism and the occult.

Source, Women's History

A Tale of Irish Courtship

Cork Police Office Judy Sullivans, antient dame, indicted for assaulting Miss Juliet Donnelly, tearing her bonnet and dishevelling her auburn dresses. Juliet’s lawyer requested she stand at the end of the table and remove her gloves. Judy (casting a scornful…

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General, Women's History

Couple Beggars in Ireland

Within a context of relatively low levels of interference from Church and State, the urban lower classes often determined their own regulatory mechanisms for marriage that were shaped by their local contexts. In both Dublin and, in most Presbyterian Irish…

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General, Women's History

Policing Marriage

From the early nineteenth century, newspapers began to report on the operation of the local police and magistrate courts. The reportage of such cases uncovered the daily operations of the local court, as well as providing insight into working-class life…

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Source, Women's History

Some Early Irish Feminism?

Taken from the Freeman’s Journal, 26 February 1841 Dublin Police- Henry Street Office CHARGE OF BIGAMY An interesting-looking young woman, named Anne Kirwan, applied to Mr. Duffy, the presiding magistrate, to have informations taken against John Kirwan, her husband, on…

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