(For S.H.) It was a year after the artist was drowned that the loan exhibition of Hugo Blake’s paintings was opened in Philadelphia by Maeve. “Whom the gods love die young,” people said. To remember those paintings is like remembering a dream-life spent with the Ever-living in an Ireland untrodden by men. Except once he …
Continue reading "The Portrait of Róisín Dhu – Dorothy Macardle (1924)"
"Haunting and the appearance of specters or ghosts is one way [...] we are notified that what's been concealed, is very much alive and present, interfering precisely with those always incomplete forms of containment and repression ceaselessly directed towards us." (Avery Gordon xvi) Many a year ago, before chloroform was thought of, there lived in …
Continue reading "Hertford O’Donnell’s Warning – Charlotte Riddell (1867)"
December 1894 "If you pick up one of the old Christmas numbers you will always find a good sprinkling of ghost stories among the contents, and even to day, the tradition has not died out though there is less room in our busy world of spooks and amusements for them""The Schools’ Collection, Volume 0854, Page …
Continue reading "A Scrap of Irish Folklore – Rosa Mulholland (1894)"
"The dark days of Christmas are closely surrounded with weird beliefs which the long nights provide ample time in which to discuss the mysteries of the unknown, about the fireside." The Schools' Collection, Volume 0854, Page 032. by Dúchas © National Folklore Collection, UCD is licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0. When, through the death of …
Continue reading "A Strange Christmas Card Game – Charlotte Riddell (1868)"
"At such a time of the year, and in such delightful relations with nature, if one has not actually a close sympathetic companionship with some other living creature, one is apt to create something of the kind out of one's own imagination..." It happened only five summers ago. I had had a hard winter and …
Continue reading "The Ghost at Wildwood Chase – Rosa Mulholland (1888)"
Villa Nova, Blackrock. Garden View. (The home of Lady Gilbert (Rosa Mulholland and John Gilbert) Image from The Life of John Gilbert, Internet Archive Flickr Commons Born in Belfast in 1841, Rosa Mulholland (pseudonym Ruth Murray) was a prolific writer of poetry and fiction, for both adults and children. She published her first novel, Dunmara, …
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Biography Born in County Antrim in 1832, Charlotte Elizabeth Lawson Cowan moved to London with her mother after her father’s death. Much of her early work was published under pseudonyms F. G. Trafford, Rainey Hawthorne or R.V. M. Sparling and after marriage to Joseph Hadley Riddell in 1857, she used her married title – Mrs. J.H. Riddell. …
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Group photograph of members of the Women Writers' Club and Dorothy Macardle. Reproduced by Kind permission of UCD-OFM Partnership. For the most up-to-date consideration of Macardle's life and work, see Leeann Lane's new biography Dorothy Macardle, published by UCD Press in 2019. Dorothy Macardle's entry in the Dictionary of Irish Biography here. In 2018, Kilmainham …
Continue reading "Dorothy Macardle – Further Reading and Resources"
Ghostly Fictions 
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