Welcome back to Irish Fiction Fridays! Happy New Year! This year is an important one for Dublin2019 as the bid will be voted on at Worldcon75 in Helsinki. Stay tuned for more information on the voting process, volunteering, spreading the word, and more. But for your reading pleasure, our first author of 2017 is Margaret Wolfe Hungerford – better known perhaps by her pen name “The Duchess.”
Margaret Hamilton was born in Rosscarbery, County Cork on April 27, 1855. She would marry twice and have six children before dying of typhoid fever in 1897. The Duchess was popular throughout the English speaking world in the late 19th century for her light romantic fiction. Her most famous work is arguably Molly Brown, and both she and the novel are mentioned in James Joyce’s Ulysses. Molly Brown also contains the phrase “beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” and Hungerford is credited with coining this popular phrase.
The novel we are featuring today, however, is The Haunted Chamber, and as the name might suggest, rather than light romance, this novel is a gothic murder tale!
