Volume 24, Number 19 · November 24, 1977
'Elusive Mr. P.'
By Conor Cruise O'Brien
Charles Stewart Parnell
by F.S.L. Lyons
Oxford University Press, 704 pp., $20.00
Most of the leading political figures of nineteenth-century Britain—Gladstone at their head—were intensely concerned with how posterity should see them. They kept papers—huge masses of papers in Gladstone's case—with their future biographers in mind. Parnell was different. He was not a reader—his brother John said that the only book he saw him read was Youatt's The Horse—nor was he a writer. Few letters by him exist. They are all short and wholly practical—if we except the endearments in the letters to his mistress and then wife Mrs. O'Shea which she later published in her book on him. The period of his political leadership—1880-1890—was also the period of his liaison with Mrs. O'Shea (whom he married in June 1891, shortly after her divorce, and before his own death in October of the same year).
Review, 2812 words
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