Doreen: The Story of a Singer

by Edna Lyall

A novel dealing with the Fenian agitations that rocked late-Victorian England. Doreen is an Irish singer with a father that has been imprisoned due to his nationalist sympathies. Can her love for a young Englishman survive through politics?

160 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2012

About the author

Edna Lyall was the pseudonym used by Ada Ellen Bayley. Bayly was born in Brighton, the youngest of four children of a barrister. At an early age, she lost both her parents and she spent her youth with an uncle in Surrey and in a Brighton private school. Bayly never married and she seems to have spent her adult life living in with her two married sisters and her brother, a clergyman in Bosbury in Herefordshire. In 1879, she published her first novel, Won by Waiting, under the pen name of "Edna Lyall" (apparently derived from transposing letters from Ada Ellen Bayly). The book was not a success. Success came with We Two, based on the life of Charles Bradlaugh, a social reformer and advocate of free thought. Her historical novel In the Golden Days was the last book read to John Ruskin on his deathbed. Bayly wrote eighteen novels.

Reviews

[Nicole C. (using StoryGraph more these days) · Rating 3 out of 5]

Story about a poor Irish girl who makes her fortune, set against the backdrop of anti-Irish sentiment and politics in England. At times the book gets bogged down in political events that we never touched on in school; however, I'm sure Ms. Lyall's audience was familiar with.