14 Facts About Emily Lawless

Emily Lawless was an Irish novelist, historian, entomologist, gardener, and poet from County Kildare.

Emily Lawless was born at Lyons House below Lyons Hill, Ardclough, County Kildare.

Emily Lawless spent part of her childhood with the Kirwans of Castle Hackett, County Galway, her mother's family, and drew on West of Ireland themes for many of her works.

Emily Lawless's grandfather was Valentine Lawless, a member of the United Irishmen and son of a convert from Catholicism to the Church of Ireland.

Emily Lawless's brother Edward Lawless, who inherited the family home, was a landowner with strong Unionist opinions, a policy of not employing Roman Catholics in any position in his household, and chairman of the Property Defence Association set up in 1880 to oppose the Land League and "uphold the rights of property against organised combination to defraud".

Emily Lawless was not in good terms with her brother Edward.

Yeats wrote scathingly about Emily Lawless's supposed stereotyping of Irish peasants, and his views later contributed to the neglect of her work.

Similarly, her initial opposition to female suffrage has been often read as an anti-feminist position, yet much of her work makes a strong case for female autonomy, in financial and creative terms, and Emily Lawless was a noted and popular writer in the "New Woman" movement which swept English fiction and journalism in the late nineteenth century.

Emily Lawless occasionally wrote under the pen name "Edith Lytton".

Some archival material pertaining to Emily Lawless is held in Marsh's Library, Dublin.

Emily Lawless wrote nineteen works of fiction, biography, history, nature studies and poetry, many of which were widely read at the time.

Emily Lawless is increasingly considered a major fiction writer of the late nineteenth century, and an early modernist innovator.

Emily Lawless is often remembered for her Wild Geese poems.

Emily Lawless's reputation was damaged by William Butler Yeats who accused her in a critique of having "an imperfect sympathy with the Celtic nature" and for adopting "theory invented by political journalists and forensic historians".