Recovering the Local-colour Stories of London-Irish Writer and Columnist Erminda Rentoul Esler

Giulia Bruna Donegal native Erminda Rentoul Esler (1860-1924) was a novelist, short-story writer, and journalist who lived and worked in London from 1889. Notably, W. B. Yeats included her in his 1895 articles on Irish National Literature for The Bookman and there referred to…

“A good English factory-girl”: the erased Irishness of nineteenth-century poet Fanny Forrester in Ben Brierley’s Journal

Dr Suz Garrard Twenty-first century newspapers and media outlets have unparalleled power to not only shape the narratives surrounding superstructural subjects such as immigration, but to construct the social, political, and national identities of the individuals they represent. The power of the media to…

“Which is Kit?”: Discovering Kathleen Blake Coleman

By Tara Giddens, University of Limerick   I was first introduced to Kathleen Blake Coleman (1856-1915) by my supervisor when discussing PhD topics. Coleman was an eminent journalist in Canada and the United States at the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. …