Discipline, Sentiment, and the Irish-American Public: Mary Ann Sadlier's Popular Fiction.

This article focuses on Mary Ann Sadlier, the most popular and influential Irish-American writer of the famine generation. Sadlier wrote a number of novels that are set in Ireland; she also wrote a number of novels about Irish migration to the New World. Sadlier was born Mary Ann Madden in County Cavan in 1820 and raised by her father, who was a fairly comfortable merchant. She began publishing poetry in a London magazine at age eighteen. Sadlier's circum-Atlantic life and publishing career, her fairly privileged connections with the Catholic publishing and church establishments, and her commitment to the creation of new forms of popular literature indicate some important features of the particular historical moment to which her novels responded.