write children's and educational books, for instance a well-regarded survey of Early Egyptian History (1861) and an accessible account of various Biblical nations, The Nations Around (1870). Annie Keary branched out in 1859 into adult fiction with Through the Shadows (1859), but literary acclaim had to wait until her novel Castle Daly: The Story of an Irish Home Thirty Years Ago (1875), which was reprinted several times up to the end of the 1880s. It covers the Great Famine and the Young Irelanders' Uprising, and was serialized initially in Macmillan's Magazine. A facsimile of the 1886 edition of it appeared in Volume 5 of Irish Women's Writing, 1838–1888. It was said to delineate perceptively "the strong and weak points of Saxon and Celtic character". Oldbury (1869) is a novel set in the little town where she was raised. Keary's final novel, A Doubting Heart (1879), was completed by a friend, Mrs K. Macquoid. Like her earlier work for adults, it shows signs of being stretched to fill the three volumes required by publishers in those days, although the characterizations and sense of place are strong. Her original fairy-tales appeared in Little Wanderlin, and other fairy tales (1865), written with her sister Eliza. Another long fairy-tale entitled "Through the Wood" is told in the middle of a late sequel to her best-selling Sidney Grey novel: Sidney Grey: A Year from Home (1876). This differs strongly from the short "Through the Wood" story in Little Wanderlin. Her collaborator Eliza later wrote the fantasy novel The Magic Valley (1877), which also has fairy-tale elements It was issued in abridged form as part of a schools series, in about 1912, along with poetic adaptations of Annie Keary's fairy tales. She also wrote poetry and collaborated with her sisters Eliza and Maud on Enchanted Tulips and Other Verses for Children, but this seems not to have been published until 1914. A decade later came a small collection from Macmillan: Little Wanderlin, Little Silver Ear, The Magic Valley: And Poems of Childhood (1924). Eliza Harriett Keary (1827–1918) Apart from her collaborations with Annie Keary and her memoir of her, Eliza wrote poetry, which was published at the time and has received recent attention from feminist scholars. She died in Torquay in 1918. Her nephew Charles Francis Keary (1848–1917), was also an acclaimed author of both realist and weird fiction, and a cataloguer for numismatic studies. References