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Book of the Month -- September 2024
The Colleen Bawn, by Richard Lloyd Fitzgerald
The murder of Ellen Hanlywas one of the most sensational and widely publicised crimes of 19th Century Ireland. In 1819 John Scanlan, one of a family of minor gentry in Co. Limerick in the South of Ireland, set his eye on the 15-year old niece of a local peasant. He seduced her, went through a sham marriage, and took her away, along with her uncle's life savings. After a while he tired of her and had spent all the money, so he got his manservant Stephen Sullivan to murder her and dump the body in the river Shannon. It was washed up a few months later, and the culprits were identified by the rope which had been used to tie her body, which was identified by a local man as one he had lent Sullivan. Scanlan was soon captured and convicted, despite being defended by Daniel O'Connell, and hanged still protesting his innocence. Sullivan evaded capture for a while, but was finally caught, tried and executed. Between conviction and execution he made a detailed confession, saying he had acted entirely on Scanlan's orders.
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The Ex-Classics project was founded in 2000 to fill an unmet need. When reading the blurb etc. to a book by Charles Dickens or Charlotte Bronte, say, we would often come across sentences like "Favourite reading included . . ." If it's good enough for them, it's good enough for us. So off we go to the library or bookshop, to be met first with blank stares and then with the information that the book has been out of print for decades. Our first two books were Gil Blas and Hudibras,which are prime examples of this. This web site is dedicated to rescuing these works from obscurity and making them available online, both for reading directly, and for downloading.
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