Susan L. Mitchell

Dr. Richard M. Kain

1972
96 pages
ISBN 0-8387-7768-6
Irish Writers Series

A new note enters the Irish Writers Series with Susan L. Mitchell. Dublin has long been famed for conversation, a brew of wit, malice and learning. Miss Mitchell's light verse captures this flavor. She was, Mr. Kain notes, "an amused observer" of the Irish Revival. Her role was played for a quarter century on the stages of Dublin drawing rooms.

Little has been written about this delightful and sometimes profound minor author. An intimate friend and editorial associate of George William Russel (the poet AE), Miss Mitchell was a welcome guest at the many Dublin evenings, and counted among her friends most of the great and near-great of that extraordinary group of painters, poets, and philosophers. Her insights are not only entertaining but reflect at first hand her famed contemporaries.

Mr. Kain has drawn upon his own extensive contacts with Dublin and his knowledge of this past age to present a hitherto almost forgotten writer. His research has uncovered numerous uncollected poems and items in magazines and anthologies. Susan L. Mitchell is a portrait of the artist as a woman of great personal charm, brilliant wit, and inner spirituality.

About the author:

Dr. Richard M. Kain is a Professor of English at the University of Louisville, and has published or lectured on Irish writers in Canada, Ireland, France, Italy, Lebanon, Nigeria, and the United States. Fabulous Voyager (1947) and Joyce: the Man, the Work, the Reputation (with Marvin Magalaner, 1956) are basic studies, now in paperback. With Robert Scholes he edited The Workshop of Daedalus (1965), a volume of Joyce sources, and he is the author of Dublin in the Age of W.B. Yeats and James Joyce (1962) and another volume in the Irish Writers Series.