The Farm By Lough Gur: The Story of Mary Fogarty

by Mary Carbery (As Told to), Elizabeth Corsellis (Illustrations), Shane Leslie (Introduction)

The Lilliput Press is proud to be reissuing Mary Carbery’s classic, The Farm by Lough Gur. First published in London in 1937, it was quickly reprinted. Though very well received in England and a best-seller in Dublin, some questioned its quiet recall of an elysian rural Ireland before the Land War, its image of a contented Victorian world in the rich lands of east Limerick that rather jarred with the rhetoric of De Valera’s Ireland. Its woodcut images seemed English not Irish, and its ambiguous authorship gave ammunition to the doubters – was this really the voice of old Mary Fogarty, née O’Brien, or the heavily edited text produced by an Anglo-Irish friend and littérateur, Mary Lady Carbery? The text was indeed crafted by Mary Carbery, a sharp observer and accomplished essayist, but the strength of the book rests on Mary Fogarty’s contribution: the draft notes and papers that she sent over to Mary Carbery, fleshed out by information supplied by other members of the O’Brien clan. Her memories provide what remains an entirely convincing account of the lost world of the strong-farm family in post-famine Munster, one far more secure in its social status than that of other Catholic writers such as Charles Kickham or Canon Sheehan. Eighty years later, there are still few histories and even fewer fictional accounts of that rural Catholic middle class like the O’Briens, who confidently expected to be the inheritors of the earth in a HomeRule Ireland. Their world has rarely been evoked so sensitively as in this beguiling and most engaging narrative

Genres: Biography, Ireland

308 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 1982

About the author

Mary Carbery (1867-1949), pen name and married name of Mary Vanessa Toulmin, who married first Algernon, 9th Baron Carbery of Castle Freke, County Cork, Ireland and second Professor Arthur Wellesley Sandford of Frankfield House, County Cork, Ireland. She was born and spent her childhood at Childwickbury Manor, Hertfordshire and died at Eye Manor, Herefordshire. Amongst her books are The Children of the Dawn, The Farm by Loch Gur, The Light in the Window, Hertfordshire Heritage, The Germans in Cork (a warning to the pro-German faction in Ireland of what a German invasion would really be like), Happy World, and West Cork Journal (edited by her grandson, Jeremy Sandford). Her eldest son by her first marriage, John, 10th Baron Carbery, was an Irish nationalist and member of the Kenyan Happy Valley set. Her eldest son by her second marriage, Christopher Sandford, was proprietor of the Golden Cockerel Press. She spent much of the early part of the last century crossing Europe in Creeping Jenny, a caravan drawn by white oxen, and is credited with being the first person to install a bath in a mobile home. She is the subject of the second half of the book "Happy Memories" (Faith Press, 1960), by her sister, Constance Toulmin.

Reviews

[Rosie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just living out my childhood fantasies in late 20th century rural Ireland. An entertaining and delightful window into life in rural Ireland in a sort of calm between the storms period of history. Includes wonderful tidbits of country life, vocabulary, folklore, customs, and centers on a lovely family that seems to not be shitty in any way. It was just a pleasure to read about "kindred spirits from long ago" as both my 11 and 34 year old self still think the same way. I was so enamored by the sisters' and mother's relationship with literature in particular that I am taking some of their book recommendations into account (thus my new love of George Eliot).

The kind of escapism where not everyone dies at the end and some happy things happen and not much happens at all and it's great.

[Trisha · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was given this book to read by our Irish cousin Eddie O’Dea on our recent trip to Ireland. We spent four days in the tiny village of Bruff, close to Lough Gur a beautiful little lake at the base of a steep and rugged hill in County Limerick, Ireland. It’s a magical place steeped in folk lore, history and archeological significance and this memoir is an account of what it was like to grow up on a farm nearby in post famine, 19th century Ireland. Sissy O’Brien was one of four daughters living in a close knit middle class family whose parents were prosperous enough to be able to employ dairy maids and farm hands to help with the many chores and tasks that needed to be done on a large pre-industrialized farm. She sent her notes and reminiscences of that life to her friend Mary Carbery who turned them into a memoir, drawing upon additional information supplied by other family members and relatives. (The family’s descendents still live in the area and have recently been working with Eddie O’Dea to gather genealogical information about the O’Briens.) It was fascinating to read this book while spending a few days wandering around the same places the O’Brien family had known so well a century and a half earlier. The book’s vivid descriptions of what life was like back then introduced me to a world filled with colorful characters and fascinating customs that have long since disappeared even though much of the landscape has remained unchanged. It’s an area steeped in archeological significance, having once been the sight of thriving community during the Neolithic age. One of Ireland’s largest stone circles as well as a chamber tomb and crannog (manmade island) can be found there and to this day archeologists are unearthing farm implements and other artifacts just as they were beginning to do during the time Sissy O’Brien lived there. But it was beautiful Lough Gur itself that made this book such a treasure to read while looking out across the water to the rugged hills beyond just as Sissy O’Brien had done. The lake was calm and tranquil, dotted with swans and other waterfowl, descendents of the same ones that had been there when the O’Brien sisters used to run barefoot along the shore, trying to listen for the ceolsidhe – the fairy music that the spirit of the lake sang, or the whispering sounds of the suantraighe – the song of laughter the red haired magical dwarf played on his three stringed harp. The lake is steeped in magic and folklore. It’s said that at midnight on Christmas Eve some people can see an enchanted village lit with lights twinkling beneath the water. Others tell of the fate of the late Garret Fitzgerald, Earl of Desmond who must gallop over the water and around the lake on his “silver shod milk white steed” once every seven years until the silver is worn off the horse’s hooves at which time the enchantment will be lifted and the Earl will be able to return to the life he left behind. Lough Gur, like so much of Ireland, is a magical place and I was fortunate not only to be able to spend a little time there but also to have been given Mary Carbery’s book as a travel guide to a lost but not forgotten world.

[Eldon.shirkley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nostalgic

[Orion · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is part novel, part reminiscence, and part biography. The challenge to the reader is to distinguish which parts of the narrative are which. The book was written by an English aristocrat who befriended an Irish farmer, whose stories of her childhood inspired the author to write the book. The book describes the childhood and adolescence of the Irish farmer in the format of short, fast-moving chapters. The heroine lives near a lake (lough) in County Limerick in the 1860s - 1870's, generally at a dairy farm with her younger sisters, parents, and their employees but in some chapters at a boarding school run by Catholic nuns. A notable feature of the book is the conflicting feelings that the heroine has for various people and groups. As Irish, she looks down upon the occupying English yet she and her family distinguish themselves as being in a higher class of society than their employees largely by the degree in which they have adapted the English accent and grammar. She also has a great respect for the English literature and alleged assistance to the Irish economy. Similarly, she adores her parents, who rule the household, children and staff like a king and queen, yet she eventually chafes at the thought she is being used by them. She stresses how happy and content the people at the farm were, but elsewhere notes how, in search of an easier life, many of the locals emigrated to America once they had the means to do so.
As a novel, the book lacks depth, and although it purports to be an accurate retelling of the heroine's life, the facts are so interwoven with the author's fiction that it is unreliable. Relationships are explored, but the mechanics of the farm's operation are sketchy. It is nonetheless an achievement in creating an impression of a meaningful time and place, however flawed that impression may be.

[Lorna Sixsmith · Rating 4 out of 5]

A charming memoir of times gone by in Irish farming. What I found to be particularly interesting were the snippets about her love life, the tales of matchmaking amongst others and how her own marriage was engineered to an extent.