Fuller, Anne

Irish novelist Anne Fuller was the author of three comparatively well-received popular romances that earned her comparisons with Frances Burney and Sophia Lee. Although overlooked today, her fiction provides a useful illustration of the overlap of Gothic and historical modes in late-eighteenth-century British and Irish fiction. Moreover, the contemporary reception of her works demonstrates the gendered restrictions on female authorship in the closing decades of the eighteenth century. Fuller published three popular romances between 1786 and 1789: The Convent, or the History of Sophia Nelson (1786), Alan Fitz-Osborne (1787), and The Son of Ethelwolf (1789). Fuller’s parents were William Fuller, from West Kerries, outside Tralee, Co. Kerry, and Jane Harnett, and it is thought that the family owned land in Cork (Loeber and Loeber 2006, 477). Fuller was evidently resident there when she published her novels, and she is several times referred to by contemporary newspapers as “Miss Anne Fuller of Cork” (Advertisement of Alan Fitz-Osborne 1787, 3; “Deaths” 1790, 392). Her Cork connections are emphasized in the dedication of her second novel to “Mrs. Newenham, of Maryborough,” a reference to well-established Cork gentry with a seat at Maryborough House, Carrigaline, Co. Cork. Fuller never married and died from consumption near Cork in 1790.