Associate Professor Thomas McLean is pictured with a member of the Frances Browne Literary Festival Committee, Shirley-Anne Bonner, at the Frances Browne statue in Stranorlar, Ireland.
Nineteenth-century poet and novelist Frances Browne was widely known in the Victorian era as “the Blind Poetess of Ulster”. Her fame faded after her death but there has been a resurgence of interest in her work in the twenty-first century.
Associate Professor of English at Otago Thomas McLean was recently honoured in Browne’s Irish hometown with the 2024 Frances Browne Award for his role in this revival – an occasion he says is a highlight of his academic career.
In 2003, Thomas published one of the first academic articles on Frances Browne (1816-1879) in the American journal Victorian Poetry. This article provides a detailed biography of the writer, examines some of the early reviews of her work, and argues for the significance of her poetry.
Thomas, who is also an associate of Otago’s Centre for Irish and Scottish Studies, recalls most of the research took place just before the internet transformed the way we conduct archival work.
“It was a lot of slow, steady digging through nineteenth-century publications.”
Since then, a growing number of writers and scholars have examined the life and work of Frances Browne. Many of these subsequent articles make use of Thomas’ foundational work.
Frances Browne Literary Festival Committee member Shirley-Anne Bonner is also a PhD student and playwright at the University of Galway. She says Thomas is a pioneer in Frances Browne Studies.
“Part of my research is on Frances Browne, and when I began over ten years ago, Thomas McLean's 2003 article was the only detailed scholarly text on Browne's writing. It remains a foundational text for many subsequent articles.
“Previous academic references had been limited to brief biographical sketches or focused on Browne's blindness or on her writing for children. Thomas’ original analysis validated Browne's unique poetic voice, and pointed to her astute political awareness, and complex notions of identity,” Shirley-Anne says.
Though Browne first made her name as a poet, she also wrote essays, short stories, and novels. Her most popular work, Granny’s Wonderful Chair (1857), is a collection of fairy stories that remained in print for much of the twentieth century.
Browne’s Irish hometown of Stranorlar erected a statue in honour of the writer in 2010, and in 2021 established the annual Frances Browne Literary Festival, held in the Donegal twin towns of Stranorlar and Ballybofey.
This year Thomas attended as a guest of the festival. He spoke at the event’s launch, led a masterclass on nineteenth-century letters, and gave the 2024 Frances Browne Lecture.
“Receiving the award was a complete surprise. It is an absolute highlight of my academic career.” – Thomas McLean
After speaking at the festival launch, Thomas received the 2024 Frances Browne Award. Shirley-Anne says the criterion for this award is to have made an exceptional contribution to re-animating interest in Frances Browne and in her work.
“Receiving the award was a complete surprise. It is an absolute highlight of my academic career,” says Thomas.
“It was such a pleasure attending the festival and learning first-hand about the land and languages and cultures that shaped Browne’s writings.”
Donegal, though a part of the Republic, is in the north of Ireland. It was shaped by the ‘plantation’ system of the sixteenth and seventeenth-century British kings and queens, who attempted to establish English, Scottish, and Welsh settlers across Ulster, the northernmost region of Ireland, on lands confiscated from Irish rulers.
As a result of this complex history, there are three languages in Donegal: English, Irish, and Ulster Scots. The festival includes an annual poetry contest that presents awards for poetry written in each of the three languages.
Thomas’ research on Browne continues. In 2020, he supervised the thesis of MA student Josef Geissler, researching Browne’s Legends of Ulster – a collection of ghost stories that Browne wrote during Ireland’s famine years. The pair hope to co-author an article that extends Josef’s MA work.
The Legends of Ulster were published individually in four journals but have never been collected and published as a set. Thomas is now working on making these a single edition. Earlier this month he was awarded a University of Otago Prestigious Writing Grant to assist him in this and is in discussions about publishing with a university press.
“I think people at the festival really enjoyed learning about these stories, since many of them are set in or near Donegal, and they concern events and figures - some historical, some legendary – that are well known in this part of the country, but not so well known outside Ulster.
“I hope that, in a couple of years, I’ll be able to return to Stranorlar and present the Festival Committee with a copy of my new edition.”