Fanny Parnell: The Songstress of the Land League

While Charles Stewart Parnell was the leader of the Home Rule movement, it was the Parnell women, most particularly, Fanny, who provided its administrative, intellectual, and financial backbone. Because of her poetry and political writings, Fanny achieved transatlantic celebrity and was more popular than her brother before her untimely death at the age of 33. Largely ignored in historiography, this chapter recovers her most influential written contributions, such as The Hovels of Ireland (1880) and the poem “Hold the Harvest” (1880). As she became better known, Fanny Parnell claimed that she did not want literary fame, but that her poems were a means to an end to increase awareness of social issues. Moreover, the fact that Fanny was so often likened to Speranza—the poet of the 1840s—showed that nationalist women writers had a transatlantic public lineage.