“Six Thousand Half Forgotten Victims”: Mary Anne Sadlier, Contested Famine Memory, and French-Canadians

This chapter examines why Mary Anne Sadlier did not write about her eyewitness impressions of the Irish Famine migration to Montreal in 1847 until over four decades after the event. It compares and contrasts her portrayals of French-Canadians as devout co-religionists and Irish Catholic surrogates in Elinor Preston (1861; serialized 1857) with the more negative impressions of them in Protestant Irish author Elizabeth Hely Walshe’s Cedar Creek (1863–1864). It can be argued that bitter confessional rivalries shaped both writers’ impressions not only of French-Canadians but also Sadlier’s remembrances of the Famine dead which seem to have been inhibited by the installation of the Black Rock Famine memorial by the city’s Protestant hierarchy in 1859. It suggests that it was not until the reclamation of the monument by the city’s Irish Catholic community as a site of pilgrimage and communal procession in the decades that followed that Sadlier began to draw upon her memories of the Famine migration in service of a more useable past.