Anois agus arís
By PETER BERRESFORD ELLIS
WHEN Frances Browne from Stranorlar, Co. Donegal, died in London on August
25, 1879, few people noticed her passing. Yet ‘The Blind Poetess
of Donegal’ had been an internationally bestselling writer as well
as poet.
She was so forgotten in the years following her death that Frances Hodgson
Burnett (1849-1924) — author of Little Lord Fauntleroy and The Secret
Garden — had been able to take the Donegal writer’s wonderful
book of fairy stories, Granny’s Wonderful Chair, and issue it as
her own work.
Today, in spite of some effort, I have been unable to trace the London
grave of this remarkable writer.
Frances Browne was born in Stranorlar in the Finn Valley on January 16,
1816, the seventh child out of 12 in the family of the local postmaster.
At the age of two she contracted smallpox which left her purblind or partially
sighted.
She was a determined girl and persuaded her brothers and sister, who attended
Mr McGranahan’s parochial school, to read to her in the evenings
and to explain their lessons. She would recite these lessons aloud to
herself at night when everyone was asleep. Her memory was so developed
that she persuaded the local schoolmaster to even teach her French and
grammar.
With the help of a sister, who became her regular reader, she began to
write verse. Her first poems were written at the age of seven. She wrote
The Songs of our Land, published in the Irish Penny Journal. Others began
to appear in Hood’s Magazine and the Athenaeum and Lady Blessington’s
Keepsake. One poem was included in Duffy’s Ballad Poetry of Ireland.
In 1844 The Star of Attéghei, her first volume of poetry, appeared
and a second volume, Lyrics and Miscellaneous Poems, in 1848.
But it was the first volume that had attracted attention, even the attention
of Robert Peel, the Prime Minister, who secured a civil list pension of
£20 a year for her in view of her talent despite her handicap. It
was that pension which allowed her to leave Ireland in 1847.
She left Ireland in the midst of The Great Hunger without regret. Her
life had been one of penury and hardship there. She wrote: “I go
as one that comes no more, yet go without regret. The summers other memories
store ‘twere summers to forget.”
Yet a recurrent theme in her poetry became the exile’s homecoming.
She went to Edinburgh first where her industry was amazing and she was
soon mixing in the same circles as John Wilson (who wrote as Christopher
North — 1785-1854), poet, novelist and editor at Blackwoods Magazine.
As well as poetry and essays she had embarked on writing novels such as
The Ericksons and The Clever Boy. So far she had made a living but was
not comfortably off.
In 1852 Frances decided to move to London and was helped in this move
with a gift of £100 from Henry Petty-Fitzmaurice, the 4th Marquess
of Lansdowne (1816-1866), a former Lord of the Treasury and patron of
the arts.
Here she worked on a novel called My Share of the World (1861) set out
as an autobiography of Frederick Favoursham, an aspiring writer, which
some have mistakenly listed as her own autobiography. However, it can
certainly be argued that the character Lucy is, in fact, Frances herself
in thin disguise.
In 1857 she had published her famed book of fairy tales Granny’s
Wonderful Chair which was so popular that it quickly went out of print.
But in spite of its immediate popularity it was not reprinted until after
her death.
London was to see a great outpouring of literary works, stories set, amazingly,
in many parts of the world. The Castleford Case (1862), The Orphans of
Elfholm (1862), The Younger Foresters (1864), The Hidden Sin (1866), The
Exile’s Trust — a tale of the French Revolution (1869), The
Dangerous Guest — a Jacobite uprising tale, The Foundling of the
Fens, The First of the African Diamonds and even a work on Legends of
Ulster.
By the time of her death she had published 18 books.
In 1887 Frances Hodgson Burnett published a work called Stories from the
Lost Fairy Book, re-told by the child who read them.
The so-called Lost Fairy Book was Granny’s Wonderful Chair from
which Miss Burnett made a considerable amount of money without acknowledging
the original author, bringing forth the accusation of plagiarism in the
Dictionary of Irish Literature (1979).
Frances Browne died of a heart ailment in London and, as she had foretold
in her poem written on leaving Ireland, she never returned to Donegal.
Sadly almost forgotten today, Frances Browne was a major talent who influenced
generations of children in several lands with her tales and poems.
This columnist would be happy to hear from anyone who has knowledge of
the location of her grave.
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