Anna Parnell's Political Journalism: Contexts and Texts

Anna Parnell, sister of the great Irish leader Charles Stuart Parnell, was a major political force in her own right and a pioneer radical journalist and feminist. This critical edition of her political essays discusses her, her writings for Irish, British and American newspapers. In 1880, the Parnell sisters, Anna and Fanny, founded two branches of the Ladies Land League, one in New York and one in Dublin. While C.S.Parnell was confined to Kilmainham prison, his two sisters aimed to keep up the agitation for Irish Home Rule as well as but pressure on the British government to permit it. This is the first critical edition and collection of Anna Parnell's journalism and they reflect precisely the forward edge of Irish efforts to re distribute agricultural and grazing land from the hands of the Anglo-Irish elite to agricultural tenants and workers (thus creating a modern farming class) and to create Irish rural, county and urban self government based on one man-one vote. This is an interdisciplinary study including reprints combining research in Irish, Irish-American and American history with women's studies, publishing history and cultural studies to underscore Parnell's efforts to garner support and raise funds from among Irish-American women for the cause of land reform. Beverly E.Schneller is Professor and Chair of the English Department at Millersville University in Pennsylvania. She received her PhD from Catholic University with the first dissertation in the United States on publishing history. She is the author-editor of several Oxford University Press books.