SOURCE: "The Novelists of the Peasantry," in Irish Life in Irish Fiction, Columbia University Press, 1903, pp. 120-96.

In the following essay, Krans examines the lives and works of novelists born in Ireland and raised as Catholics, discussing in particular how these novelists portrayed the lives and character of the Irish peasant and middle classes.

At the close of the first quarter of the nineteenth century a group of young writers began to appear whose works were more national and more worthy of being considered as an elucidation of Irish life and the character of the race than those of any previous novelist, except perhaps Miss Edgeworth. This is the group of novelists of the peasantry. They were all of Celtic stock, and bred in the Catholic faith. At this time O'Connell's agitation had awakened the Irish Catholics, and there is doubtless a connection between this little outburst of...