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Life
1707-1792; b. Co. Kerry, dg. of Thomas FitzMaurice, 1st Earl of Kerry and Anne Petty, dg. of Sir William Petty; ran a medical dispensary on her father"s estate; m. Col. Arthur Denny, MP for Kerry, Aug. 1726; widowed 1742; lived in Lisnaskea House, Blackrock, Co. Dublin [then Peafield Cliff House]; visited by John Wesley in 1783; involved with the Dublin Foundling Hospital and its reform, being thanked by the Irish House of Commons for "extraordinary bounty and charity"; introduced lace-making in the work-houses; received Freedom of the City in 1765 and made an hon. member of the Dublin Society, 1766 [predecessor of the RDS]; establ. Magdalen [for Magdalene] Asylum for Protestant girls on Leeson St., based on laundry employment [i.e., forced labour]; and later the Magdalen Chapel for Anglicans - where Rev. Caesar Otway was assist. chaplain; commemorated in the Lady Arebella Denny Trust and Denny House; also established asylums in Kerry; d. at home, 18 March 1792; was afraid of live burial and stipulated that her body remain in her bed for 72 hours after death. WIKI
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Works
Arthur Ponsonby’s Scottish and Irish Diaries &c. (1927) contains Lady Arabella Denny and other better-known diarists in Ireland. [Ponsonby is better known for his English Diaries from the 16th to
the 20th centuries (London: Methuen 1923).]
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Criticism
See Beatrice Bayley Butler, "Lady Arabella Denny", in Dublin Historical Record, Vol IX, No. 1 (Dec. 1946-Feb. 1947); Rebecca Lea McCarthy, Origins of the Magdalene Laundries: An Analytical History (2010) - available at Google Books online [accessed 27.07.2023].
Note: Rebecca Lea McCarthy, Origins of the Magdalene Laundries: An Analytical History (2010) - which associates the institutions with world nation-building in teh colonial era - up to its ultimate cessation in Ireland in 1996 [available at Google Books online [accessed 27.07.2023]
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