SADLIER, Mrs. J. The Fate of Father Sheehy: A Tale of Tipperary in the Olden Time.

Dublin: Duffy, 1864. Foolscap octavo. pp. 158. Publisher’s blind-stamped green cloth, titled in gilt. New endpapers. A very copy.
Loeber S15. Brown p.270.
Mrs. James Sadlier (née Madden) was born at Cootehill, County Cavan, in 1820. She was the daughter of Francis
Madden, a merchant, and was related to Thomas D’Arcy Magee. In 1844, after the death of her father, she emigrated to
Canada. Two years later she married James Sadlier. He was an Irish Catholic who had arrived in New York from
Tipperary and entered the publishing and bookselling trade with his brother Denis in 1836. The Sadliers lived in
Montreal, but moved to New York in 1860. Between 1847 and 1874 she wrote frequently for the principal Catholic
papers in America. In 1895 she received the Laetare Medal. “Each of her works of fiction had a special object in view,
bearing on the moral and religious well-being of her fellow Irish Catholics.” She says: “It is needless to say that all my
writings are dedicated to the one grand object: the illustration of our holy Faith by means of tales or stories. Her
sympathies are strongly nationalist. She died in 1903.
The story (true, though told in form of fiction) of how the heroic patriot-priest Fr. Nicholas Sheehy, was judicially
murdered at Clonmel in 1766 by the ascendancy faction, backed by the Government. Father Sheehy was a prominent
and vocal opponent of the Penal Laws, which disenfranchised and persecuted Catholics in Ireland.

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