Emily Lawless

“People as a rule were not happy, nor meant apparently to be happy, and the married state especially stood before her mind as a state of natural and inevitable discomfort - one in which there was always a more or less troublesome and unmanageable male to be fed, looked after, and put up with generally. That it possessed any counterbalancing advantages; that it could, even at the start, be, for a woman, a state of especial happiness, she simply did not, for a moment, believe . . . Her own private opinion was that all that was an invention got up by the men. They persuaded the women to believe there was something pleasant in it, and the silly creatures were fools enough to believe them.”

“Already, even while the priest stood beside her, while the prayers she had so longed for, those prayers which Grania had died to obtain for her, were being uttered, she was drifting across its borderland; already its sounds rather than his voice, rather than any earthly voices, were in her ears; already her foot was upon its threshold. And upon that threshold, perhaps - who knows? - who can tell? - they met.”

“Irish heroes, for one reason or another, have come off, it must be owned, but poorly before the bar of history.”