Kavanagh, JULIA

Kavanagh, JULIA, novelist, was born at Thurles, in County Tipperary, in 1824. She was the daughter of Morgan Kavanagh, an accomplished Irishman, author of various philological works, and she grew up a girl of remarkable beauty but of unusually small stature. Great part of her youth was spent in Normandy, her later life in Paris, Rouen, or Nice, where she died, October 28, 1877. Her first work which attracted attention was Madeline, a Tale of Auvergne (1848); of its numerous successors the best were Nathalie (1850), Daisy Burns (1853), Adèle (1857), Queen Mab (1863), Beatrice (1865), Silvia (1870), John Dorrien (1875), and The Pearl Fountain (1876). The scenes of almost all her stories are laid in her adopted country, and her studies of French life and character possess a reality and truth unhappily but seldom found in the fluent novels of foreign writers who have light-heartedly essayed these themes. Her plots move quietly but naturally forward to the dénouement, and skilfully preserve the interest, if they do not feed the excitement, of the reader. Other well-known books are A Summer and Winter in the Two Sicilies (1858), French Women of Letters (1862), English Women of Letters (1863), Woman in France during the Eighteenth Century (1850), and Women of Christianity (1852)—a work which reveals beautifully the sympathetic and religious nature of its authoress, herself a devout Catholic.