Thanks to Ronnie Mathews of Portarlington for alerting me to a number of other references to Margaret Brew:
The first few are from:
Irish Novelists and the Victorian Age
James H. Murphy
Print publication date: 2011
Print ISBN-13: 9780199596997
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: January 2011
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199596997.001.0001
Chapter 1 at
http://fds.oup.com/www.oup.com/pdf/13/9 ... prelim.pdf
pp.17-18 says:
A rough tally of authors who were most frequently and seriously reviewed in the half dozen or so Victorian journals and magazines that were significantly in the business of carrying regular book reviews reveals that ... [in] the 1880s, [Justin] McCarthy was joined by George Moore, Richard Ashe King, and Richard Dowling. The women consisted of the ever-reliable [Charlotte] Riddell, together with two further Victorian stalwarts, Mrs Hungerford and Mrs Alexander, the independent May Laffan, Emily Lawless, and four of the more prominent women, land-war novelists Margaret Brew, E. Owens Blackburne, Letitia McClintock, and Mabel Robinson.
The Outline of Chapter 6 says:
In the 1870s and 1880s realism was achieved in the work of Margaret Brew and Annie Keary.
And the concluding Chapter 12 notes that:
landlord–tenant polarities that inhibited realism were overcome on a number of occasions: in the male equality of life of the military novel; in the isolated world of Grania; in Annie Keary's Castle Daly, which compresses socio-political divisions into one social class; and in parallel stories at landlord and tenant level, a strategy used by Anthony Trollope and Margaret Brew.
The following very brief biography appears in
The Concise Oxford Companion to Irish Literature
(by Robert Welch
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
Print Publication Date:
2000
Print ISBN-13:
9780192800800
Published to Oxford Reference:
2003
Current Online Version:
2012
eISBN:
9780191727108)
Brew, Margaret
(?1850–?), novelist. Born in Co. Clare, probably the daughter of a landowner, she published The Burtons of Dunroe (1880) and Chronicles of Castle Cloyne (1886), both seeking social accommodation between the religions and classes.
It also lists one of her novels:
Burtons of Dunroe, The (1880), a novel by Margaret Brew dealing with religious differences in Co. Limerick before Catholic Emancipation, concerns a love-match between a Catholic peasant girl and the son of a Protestant landlord.
And it mentions her in another article:
Irish Monthly, The (1873–1954; 83 vols.), a religious journal edited by Fr. Matthew Russell. It serialized novels by Catholic authors such as Margaret Brew and M. E. Francis in the 1880s and 1890s. Before and during the literary revival it carried writings by Oscar Wilde, W. B. Yeats, and others.
The
ricorso.net article on The Irish Monthly notes
Margaret Brew, poems and stories contrib. by Brew to Irish Monthly [dated & named in Wolff]; includes ‘An Unknown Hero’, the true story of the eviction of a tenant as a reprisal for his support of O’Connell, Irish Monthly, Feb 1891.
The full reference to this story is:
An Unknown Hero
M. W. Brew
The Irish Monthly , Vol. 19, No. 212 (Feb., 1891), pp. 57-68
Published by: Irish Jesuit Province
Article Stable URL:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/20498148
Her other articles in The Irish Monthly include:
The Soul's Offering
M. W. Brew
The Irish Monthly, Vol. 14, No. 162 (Dec., 1886), pp. 679-680
A Poor Traveller
M. W. Brew
The Irish Monthly, Vol. 15, No. 163 (Jan., 1887), pp. 42-56
The Soul's Choice
M. W. Brew
The Irish Monthly, Vol. 15, No. 167 (May, 1887), pp. 276-277
To-morrow at the Breaking of the Day
M. W. Brew
The Irish Monthly, Vol. 15, No. 174 (Dec., 1887), pp. 708-709
Before I Die
M. W. Brew
The Irish Monthly, Vol. 16, No. 181 (Jul., 1888), p. 401
The Memorial Tablet
M. W. Brew
The Irish Monthly, Vol. 17, No. 190 (Apr., 1889), pp. 185-187
She is also mentioned in a number of other articles in The Irish Monthly. A review in
The Irish Monthly , Vol. 14, No. 158 (Aug., 1886), pp. 455-456
Published by: Irish Jesuit Province
Article Stable URL:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/20497448
says
Three-volume novels, which practically can be procured only from lending libraries (or circulating libraries, as they curiously prefer to call themselves), hardly come within the range of our critical jurisdiction. But an exception must be made in favour of "The Chronicles of Castle Cloyne," by M. W. Brew (London : Chapman and Hall). When a tale devoted to the delineation of Irish character and the description of Irish scenes is honoured with long eulogistic reviews in The Times, The Standard, The Morning Post, The Scotsman, and many other journals of the sort, we are by no means inclined to look upon it with favour, but rather to expect distorted views of Ireland, her past, her present, and her future, and notions of Irish social life as outrageously unreal as the pretended imitation of the Irish peculiarities of diction and pronunciation, which are facetiously styled "the brogue." Yet Miss Brew's "Chronicles of Castle Cloyne" has received these perilous commendations, and, nevertheless, is an excellent Irish tale, full of truth and sympathy, without any harsh caricaturing on the one hand, or any patronising sentimentality on the other. The heroine, Oonagh M'Dermott, the Dillons, Pat Flanagan, and Father Rafferty, are the principal personages, all excellent portraits in their way; and some of the minor characters are very happily drawn. The conversation of the humbler people is full of wit and common sense; and the changes of the story give room for pathos sometimes as a contrast to the humour which predominates. Miss Brew understands well the Irish heart and language: and altogether her "Pictures of Munster Life" (for this is the second title of the tale) is one of the most satisfactory additions to the store of Irish fiction from Castle Rackrent to Marcella Grace.
Another contributor in Pigeonhole Paragraphs
The Irish Monthly , Vol. 19, No. 218 (Aug., 1891), p.448
Published by: Irish Jesuit Province
Article Stable URL:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/20498248
wrote:
One of the two or three pens combined in the paper "Wanted an Irish Novelist," in our July Number, ought to have supplied a grievous omission. There is no mention of M. W. Brew, author of that excellent Irish novel, "The Chronicles of Castle Cloyne, or Pictures of the Munster People," published by the London publishers, Chapman and Hall, for which even the unsympathetic Saxon critics had nothing but praise: The Athenaeum, for instance, saying that "one could hardly wish for a better Irish story, more touching, more amusing, more redolent of the soil"; and The Morning Post pronouncing it "as rich in 'backbone' as excellent in detail."
Ronnie Mathews has also alerted me to an (offline) article named `La Bergerie: A House and its Memories' by PJ Tynan in Laois Heritage Society Journal, No.1, 2003. This reveals that the house is in the townland of Ballymorris, which enabled me to find it on the
OSI maps and (I hope) on
Google Streetview. It appears to be in ruins today. Tynan's article notes that the occupants around 1900 were the Headen family, who appear in Ballymorris in the
1911 census. In the
1901 census, the Headens were in Dublin and it is not immediately clear from the House and Building Return for Ballymorris who was living in La Bergerie.