the name by which
many friends called her--and a long series, numbering over forty
novels, besides countless short stories for home and American
magazines, where, together with Australia and India, she enjoyed a vast
popularity. In America everything she wrote was rapidly printed off,
first sheets of novels in hand being bought from her for Transatlantic
publications long before there was any chance of their being completed,
while every story she ever wrote can be found in the Tauchnitz series.
Among her earlier works are _Portia_, _Mrs. Geoffrey_, _Airy Fairy
Lilian_, _Rossmoyne_, etc., which were followed as years rolled on, by
_Undercurrents_, _A Life's Remorse_, _A Born Coquette_--where her
creation of the delightful old butler, Murphy, is equal to anything
ever written by her compatriot Charles Lever--, _Nor Wife, nor Maid_,
_The Professor's Experiment_, etc. The latest work that she lived to
see published is a collection of clever, crisp stories, entitled _An
Anxious Moment_, which, with a strange and pathetic significance,
terminates with a brief paper called 'How I Write my Novels'. Two
posthumous works were left completed, bearing the names, respectively,
of _Lovice_, just issued, and _The Coming of Chloe_, which will shortly
be brought out.
Thoroughly wholesome in tone, bright and sparkling in style, the
delicacy of here love-scenes and the lightness of touch that
distinguishes her character sketches can only be equalled by the
pathos, which every now and then she has thrown in, as if to temper her
vivacity with a little shade. Here and there, as in the case of _Nor
Wife, nor Maid_, she has struck a powerfully dramatic note, while her
descriptions of scenery are especially vivid and delightful, and very
often full of poetry.
The late Mrs. Hungerford was the daughter of the late Rev. Canon
Hamilton, Rector and Vicar Choral of St. Faughman's Cathedral, Ross
Carberry, co. Cork, one of the oldest churches in Ireland. Her
grandfather was John Hamilton, of Vesington, Dunboyne, a property
thirteen miles out of Dublin. The family is very old, very
distinguished, and came over from Scotland to Ireland in the Reign of
James I. She was first married when very young, but her husband died
five and a half years later, leaving her with three little girls. In
1882, _en secondes noces_, she married Mr. Thomas Henry Hungerford, of
St. Brenda's, Bandon, co. Cork, whose father's estate Cahirmore, of
about eleven thousand ac
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