Excerpt from Irish Life in Irish Fiction

No attempt has, I believe, been made before to bring into a single survey the Irish novelists of the first half of the nineteenth century and their work. This book aims to give - between a few introductory remarks upon Irish society and a literary estimate - a sketch of the vista of Irish life opened by the novelists, and, in doing this, to consider their novels most carefully where they seem, in one way or another, representative of national life and character. The value of the fiction of the period before the great famine is on the whole historical in the larger sense, not artistic. It takes on significance chiefly as a remaking of Irish life, which, by virtue of such artistic qualities as it possesses, does what history proper can hardly do, - creates the illusion of the life of the past. In the novels may be seen just how the racial antipathies, the religious antagonisms, the sleepless consciousness of past wrongs, and, in short, all the discords that broke harshly upon the everyday intercourse of man and man, found expression.

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