Carbery, Mary 1867-1949

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CARBERY, Mary 1867-1949

PERSONAL:

Born 1867, in England; died 1949; married twice.

CAREER:

Writer.

WRITINGS:

The Farm by Lough Gur, Longmans, Green (London, England), 1937, reprinted, Irish American Book Company (Lanham, MD), 1995.

Happy World: The Story of a Victorian Childhood, Longmans, Green (London, England), 1941.

(With Edwin Grey) Hertfordshire Heritage: Ourselves and Our Words, J. Green (London, Engalnd), 1948.

Mary Carbery's West Cork Journals (1898-1901); or, "From the Back of Beyond," edited by Jeremy Sandford, Lilliput (Dublin, Ireland), 1995.

SIDELIGHTS:

Mary Carbery was born in England in 1867, but her work as a writer began after she had moved to West Cork, Ireland. There she married and made her home in Castle Freke, near the Ounahincha strand. Her Irish home and environs so enchanted Lady Carbery that only the accidental burning of the castle years after her husband's death persuaded her to leave.

Carbery loved the people of West Cork as well as the place. In her journals and her work of social history, The Farm by Lough Gur, she describes the local people and their customs with tact and respect, while recording superstitions that must have struck her as strange. In one infanticidal superstition recorded in Mary Carbury's West Cork Journal, a woman who had just delivered a child refused to feed it because on the stormy night the child was born her husband neglected to untie the family's horse and donkey, and she herself had not had time to untie her hair before the child was born. These lapses were believed to result in a changeling, an idiot child substituted by the fairies for the one they had stolen.

Carbery brought alive the sadness of parents whose children had died or emigrated with characters like Mary Dinny, "a plain woman, with squinny eyes and snaggle teeth, whose children have all emigrated to America. While each had written home at first, one by one they left off writing." Mary Carbury's West Cork Journal, originally written in four volumes, was edited by screenwriter Jeremy Sandford, Carbery's grandson from her second marriage. Mary Kenny, in the Times Literary Supplement, recalled how Carbery recorded the people's sympathy for mental illness: "a local woman who has an obsession that a fox is eating her stomach is humoured in her mental malady rather than dismissed as demented." Kenny concluded that Carbery's journal is a "remarkable book" and Carbery herself a "matchless social observer."