• Defeated: A Tale [Beeton's Christmas Annual] (London: Ward, Lock & Co. 1885]), 188pp. [containing also two original drawing room plays ... by C. J. Hamilton ... [&] R. André].
• Through Troubled Waters: A Novel (London: Ward, Lock & Co. [1886]), [2], viii, 460, [14] p. ; 8º. 188pp., 8°.
• The Princes of the Glades: A Novel, 2 vols. (London1891), 8°.
• Rosni Harvey: A Novel, 3 vols. (London: Chapman & Hall 1892), 8°.
• Daughters of Men: A Novel (London: William Heinemann 1892), 380pp.
• Denys D’Auvrillac: A Story of French Life (London 1896).
• Dr. Vermont's Fantasy and Other Stories (London: London : J.M. Dent & Co. 1896), 334pp., 8°/19cm.
• Jinny Blake: A Tale (London: J. M. Dent & Co. 1897), 316pp., 8°.
• An Odd Experiment (London: Methuen & Co., 1897), 285pp.
• Clare Monro: The Story of a Mother and Daughter [Milne's Express Ser.] (London: J. Milne [1896]), 8°, and Do. [reiss.] (1900), 183pp.

• [as anon.,] Autobiography of a Child (Edinburgh: William Blackwood & Sons 1899), vi, 299pp., 8° [ NSTC 0028770].

• George Meredith: A Study (London: Metheun & Co. 1891), x, [2], 170pp., ill. [1 lf. of pls.; port.], 8°.
• trans., The History of Florence under the Domination of Cosimo, Piero, Lorenzo de' Médicis, 1434-1492, by F.-T Perrens Vol. 1, (London: Methuen & Co. 1892), viii, 475pp., 23cm.
• trans., The History of Florence from the Domination of the Medici to the Fall of the Republic: 1434-1531, by F.-T. Perrens ... Translated from the French by Hannah Lynch (London: Methuen & Co. 1892), xii, 475, [1]pp.. 8°.
• trans., The Great Galeoto. Folly or Saintliness. Two plays done from the verse of José Echegaray into English prose by H. Lynch (London: John Lane 1895), xxxvi, 1896), 4°.
• Toledo: The Story of an Old Spanish Capital, by Hannah Lynch, illustrated by Helen M. James [Mediaeval Town Ser.] (London: J. M. Dent & Co. 1898), viii, 311pp., ill. [pls., front. port.; fold. plan], 18cm.; Do. [rep. edn.] (London: Dent 1903), 17cm.
• French Life in Town and Country [Our Neighbours Ser.] (London: Dawson 1901), 8°, and Do. [2nd. edn.] (London: George Lewnes 1901), ill., 260pp.
• trans., Mediæval French Literature, by Gaston Paris [Temple Primers] (London 1903), 15cm.

• Faith Binckes & Kathryn Laing, Hannah Lynch (1859-1904): Irish Writer, Cosmopolitan, New Woman (Cork UP [2020]), 260pp.

• J. W. Foster, Irish Novels 1890-1940: New Bearings in Culture and Fiction (Oxford UP 2008) - vide Intro., pp.12, 119, 126, 130, 206, 429, 472 [[brief mentions]; Autobiography of a Child, 29, 276-79; Daughters of Men, 110 n27, 313; French Life in Town and Country, 278, 279, 280; “The Spaniard at Home”, 278-79.
• Faith Binckes & Kathryn Laing, A Forgotten Franco-Irish Literary Network: Hannah Lynch, Arvède Barine and Salon Culture of Fin-de-Siècle Paris, in Etudes Irlandaises, 36, 2 (Lille: 2011), pp. 157-71.
• Tina O’Toole, ‘The New Irish Woman: Political, Literary and Sexual Experiments’, in The History of British Women’s Writing, 1880-1920, Vol. 7, ed. Holly A. Laird, London: Palgrave 2016), [pp.25-34] p.27.

[...] Lynch’s writing was rooted in Ireland and in Irish history and politics. Like Lawless, her work addressed female experience in depth, sometimes provoking readers on both ends of the political spectrum. Through Troubled Waters (1885), her first full-length novel, was based on a historical scandal that she had heard about whilst working as a governess in Co Galway. It included the murder of daughters to make way for sons, and the landowning family concerned are said to have burned as many copies as they could lay their hands on. But the novel also attacked the moral authority priests wielded over their rural congregations, featuring the pulpit denunciation of an innocent village girl. This infuriated United Ireland, which accused Lynch of trading in crude stereotypes aimed at an English readership. Given her history with the paper, she was in no mood to accept the criticism. The editor knew, she wrote, that she had intended the book for an Irish publisher and audience. Of course she was a patriot, but she should not be asked “to prove my patriotism at the expense of truth”

Lynch continued to place Irish women at the heart of her work, but as a self-described “vagabond” and “restless wanderer” it was inevitable that her writing should come to reflect her cosmopolitanism. She had been educated in England and in France, lived for some time in Greece, and had a sister residing permanently in Spain. Lynch used these locations - and many others - in her travel writing, and in her novels and short stories blended her experiences with scenarios familiar from the New Woman literature of the period. In these books, her heroines explore their Irishness, and their gender, with others similarly liberated by mobility.

[...]

‘Who was Hannah Lynch, and why should you want to learn more about her?’ Faith Binckes and Kathryn Laing answer their own question boldly in Hannah Lynch 1859-1904, the first critical study of Lynch’s life and work: for them, she was, as the journalist Frances Low claimed, the ‘first of modern Irish writers’. This book comes a decade after Binckes wrote the entry about her for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. It identifies why she was forgotten, and makes a persuasive case for remembering her.

Laing and Binckes open with Lynch’s birth in Dublin in 1859 into ‘an atmosphere of rebellion’. She and her siblings were involved in campaigning for Irish independence from an early age. She was sent away to be educated in England, and later employed as a governess for the Handcock family in County Mayo; she would move back to London in 1880 to attend music college (taking with her the broken-up type of the proscribed newspaper United Ireland). These were the beginnings of what was to be a peripatetic and radical life.

Out of that crucible, female (political) agency emerged as one of the key themes of both Lynch’s fiction and her non-fiction. In her journalistic work for Macmillan’s Magazine (pseudonym: E. Enticknappe), she railed against the increasingly male direction of the Celtic Revivalist movement. In the Freeman’s Journal in 1896, she praised Irish women’s writing over men’s, proposing ‘a canon of female revivalists against that being established by W. B. Yeats’. Like many Irish writers, she felt ‘compelled to write from self-imposed exile’; she eventually settled in Paris, where she reviewed contemporary French novels and was notably quick to condemn in them any sign of antisemitism or nationalism - the ‘morass of hate invented by nationalism and the Ligue de la Patrie Française’ - in the wake of the Dreyfus Affair (her own earlier nationalism seems to have been a concern for Irish independence specifically, rather than the reconstruction of Irish cultural identity). Her reviews could be acerbic in the Dorothy Parker vein. Of Oscar Wilde, she wrote: ‘I have to admit that I enjoyed Lady Windermere’s Fan almost as much as if it had been a first-rate work’. In her Paris Letter of March 1898: ‘Mr [George] Meredith has said that a woman may be judged by her estimate of her sex. I judge the moral and intellectual fibre of a male writer by his estimate of women’. Such pieces were apparently widely read and appreciated. The American journalist Katherine De Forest described them as the work of a writer ‘said to be the most gifted woman Ireland ever produced’.

Lynch could be equally sharp in her fiction. In “Defeated”, a novel-length story published in Beeton’s Christmas Annual in 1885: ‘If two noble lords, neither English nor owning an acre of land in the country, were to amuse themselves by shooting each other somewhere between Donegal and Cork, there should surely appear leading articles next morning holding Ireland responsible for the deed’. Her well-received short story collection Dr Vermont’s Fantasy and Other Stories is much discussed by Binckes and Laing. It explores ‘a range of sympathetic emotional attachments that exist between nations, friends and lovers’, and from the excerpts included here would seem to have a distinctly melancholic tone. In the title story, which concerns a man planning to lead his colleagues into a group suicide, Lynch writes: ‘The worst of us, you see, have our heroic moments, only it often happens that, like Dr Vermont’s, they pass unnoticed in the dark’.

This study pays particular attention to Lynch’s travel writing, about Spain and Greece especially, and her best-known novel: the partly biographical Autobiography of a Child (1899). Originally serialized in Blackwood’s Magazine alongside Heart of Darkness, Lynch’s novel was perceived at the time, like Conrad’s novella, as a subversive attack on Empire. The ‘meanest little rascal I knew’, the narrator notes, was an ‘admirable hypocrite and bully’ - one bound to be a ‘future pillar of the British empire’. An obituary called it her masterpiece, albeit one that ‘has never won the recognition it surely will’.

So why was Hannah Lynch forgotten? Binckes and Laing suggest that ‘recent scholarship ... has identified a distinctive mode of fin-de-siècle Irish realism in texts of this period, a counter narrative to the revivalist aesthetics promoted by the Dublin coterie cultures Lynch satirised later in the decade’. She was clearly out of step with the work emanating from her homeland. Also, although she was lauded for her non-fiction, Lynch seems to have found it harder to interest publishers in her fiction, despite her voguish New Woman protagonists. The breadth of her interests in this sense perhaps worked against her; she was too political and too ‘Irish’ (or later, internationalist) to appeal strongly in England, and not nationalist (or male) enough to be celebrated by the Revivalist movement in Ireland. George Meredith (about whom Lynch wrote a critical study in 1891) wrote of her novel The Prince of Glades that ‘the task of creating interest in Fenianism would try the cleverest pen’. In addition, as Frances Low’s obituary had it, Lynch’s ‘outspoken criticism upon Irish matters and especially upon Irish politicians, coupled with her scathing wit, made her enemies almost from her girlhood: and there was an article ... on some of the little literary gods of Dublin at that time which made for her undying enemies’.

By contrast, Binckes and Laing identify strong networks of Irish female writers and artists in Dublin, London and Paris during this period. Many of these figures are undoubtedly worthy of separate studies themselves - the kind of critical attention that some, such as Kathleen Tynan, have already received: ‘contemporaries such as Jane Barlow, George Egerton, Fannie Gallaher, Rose Kavanagh, Rosa Mulholland, Emily Lawless, Somerville and Ross, and Alice Milligan’. A line can be drawn from them to Edna O’Brien (who, Eimear McBride claims, ‘gave voice to a previously muzzled generation of Irish women’) - but it should be extended back to Hannah Lynch, too. With this clearly written and thoroughly researched study, Faith Binckes and Kathryn Laing have shed light on the role of women and female artists in the shaping of events that led to Irish independence, and contributed enormously to the ongoing revision of both Irish literary history and the Irish literary canon.