Kate Cullen’s lively memoir is a riveting account of the close-knit life of Protestant Ireland, a society absorbed in its own triumphs and misfortunes, in its religion and fashions, and yet conscious that history was being made. During the 1840s; Cullen lived in Dublin, staying for periods in Sligo, Donegal, and Leitrim. A witness to the Famine, she remembered her experiences so vividly that around 1900, her daughter, Susan L. Mitchell, then a budding writer, persuaded her to dictate them. Cullen’s memoir has an additional importance in the background that it reveals about Mitchell, one of the leading figures of the Irish literary revival, later distinguished as a poet and friend of Yeats, AE, and Seumas O’Sullivan.
January 2022
