Emigration as Emancipation: Portrayals of the Immigrant Irish Girl in Nineteenth-Century Fiction

Abstract

When authors have directly experienced or witnessed the lives of those about whom they write, they often blurr the boundary fiction and history. In the case of the Irish diaspora, this is true of such authors as Peter McCorry, Bernard O'Reilly, and Harvey O'Higgins. As immigrants to America in the nineteenth century, Peter McCorry and Bernard O'Reilly experienced firsthand the difficulties of adapting to their new country. They felt they could help their fellow Irish immigrants by publishing fiction and guidebooks that could serve as practical guides on how to live and survive in America. In the same period, Sarah Orne Jewett?not an immigrant but a native New Englander, wrote fic tion that is nonetheless shaped by an intimacy with the lives of immigrant Irish. Charles Fanning observes that between 1845 and 1875 seven people wrote at least three novels each in which being Irish in America is of central concern. All seven were themselves immigrants who had come to America as adults.1 These writers?many of whom also worked as journalists?had witnessed both the Great Famine and the mass emigration that it engendered. Peter McCorry was an Irish nationalist who, besides editing the New York based Irish People, also wrote three novels that address the plight of the Irish immigrants and the difficulty of maintaining their Catholic faith in a Protestant land. The Lost Rosary (1870) is dedicated to the Irish girls in America whom he saw in particular need of guidance. Bernard O'Reilly, Catholic priest, was also deeply interested in helping his co-religionists and in promoting the Catholic faith. He first emigrated to Canada, but eventually moved to New York where he continued his work and wrote The Mirror of True Womanhood (1876) in order to set an example of womanhood that Catholic Irish girls could follow.2 Both