Irish Recollections

by Charlotte Elizabeth

To be sure I hated Ireland most cordially; I had never seen it, and as a matter of choice would have preferred New South Wales, so completely was I influenced by the prevailing prejudice against that land of barbarism!' Thus Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna recalled in her memoirs her view of Ireland as she had set off for that country in 1818. But she came to love Ireland, so much so that after her death her grave was planted with shamrocks. In this abridged version of the second edition of Personal Recollections (1847), Tonna gives a vivid account of her time in Ireland, of the violent activities of the Rockite movement in the mid-1820s in Kilkenny-Tipperary, and of the apocalyptic ultra-Evangelical 'siege mentality' during the Tithe War and the run-up to Catholic Emancipation. It is also a valuable memoir of her religious and literary development,

176 pages, Paperback

First published October 25, 2004

About the author

Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna was a popular Victorian English writer and novelist who wrote as Charlotte Elizabeth. Her work focused on promoting women's rights (see her books The Wrongs of Women and Helen Fleetwood) and evangelical Protestantism. She went deaf at the age of 10. Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote of her memoir Personal Recollections (1841): "We know of no piece of autobiography in the English language which can compare with this in richness of feeling and description and power of exciting interest.