Analysis of Emily Lawless’s Hurrish: A Study

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on May 6, 2025

As indicated by its subtitle, Hurrish: A Study was intended by Emily Lawless to reflect as much about Ireland’s general masses as about any one person. Thus, her characters serve as basic types or symbols. They scratch out a living in post-famine Ireland and are, for the most part, bitter and torn apart by land squabbles and emigration.

The novel’s protagonist stands in contrast to those conflicted individuals, happy with his life as a widower with beloved children. The enormous black-Irish Hurrish O’Brien is the gentle giant, out of place in an era and setting that demands violence from everyone. The thinly drawn Mat Brady represents the “land grabber” of the day, a foolish individual who moves in on land foreclosed on and taken from honest working folk, with sure retribution from the locals to follow. Mat’s brother, Maurice, fondly referred to as Morry by the fatherly Hurrish, also remains two-dimensional, serving as the object of retribution for his wicked brother’s murder. He represents the unspoken Irish code of his district, much stronger than any civic law, which demands an eye for an eye when one’s blood kin is killed.

Emily Lawless

Hurrish’s self-defense killing of Mat is the catalyst that prompts Maurice’s act of violence against a man he admittedly loves like a father. When he shoots the justly acquitted Hurrish, he basically kills himself as well, fulfilling the local code but marking himself as an outcast following the court ruling of Hurrish’s actions against Mat as self-defense. Alley Sheehan, Hurrish’s niece by marriage and love object for Maurice Brady, lives with the O’Briens and adores Hurrish. Her virginal, angelic personality types her immediately, and readers anticipate her eventual move into a convent long before the plot’s conclusion.

The landlord, Pierce O’Brien, acts somewhat against type in his fair dealings with his tenants, his rejection of the offer by the English law structure for bodyguard protection, and his refusal to testify against Hurrish during his trial for the murder of Mat Brady. However, he hardly had a choice in that matter, knowing Hurrish’s neighbors would kill him should he take the stand.

More interesting is Hurrish’s mother, the violent Bridget O’Brien, a type often present in drama as the mother who lives vicariously through her offspring. She has urged Hurrish to kill the loutish Mat, goading her son to act totally against character in order to satisfy her own blood lust. When Sal Connor, who has decided the widowed Hurrish will be her own, is accosted by Mat, Bridget exclaims to Sal and her son about the evil man, “Trath an’ he won’t be ’bout it long, I tell yis all that! … There’s boys that, for the wink ov an eyelid, wud put him out of that,—yis an’ proud to do it too.” Although Hurrish laughs off his mother’s thinly veiled demand with “’Tis an iligant Christsheen yer makin’ me out, mother, anyhow!” readers understand the grim foreshadowing.

Bridget also represents the highly politicized Irish figure with an inborn hatred for all outsiders, particularly the English, but also those of her own people who, like Mat, become outsiders due to their actions. She exults in the stoning death by local residents of Buggle, “the little black villin that was servin’ writs,” and, upon the death of Hurrish’s wife, Mary, “would willingly have turned Alley out upon the cold high-road to beg.” She interests feminist critics as a powerful character, one with more traditionally male characteristics than female. Bridget O’Brady is nothing like the traditional nourishing mother figure; however, her love for her son is stronger than her desire to live, leading her to die soon after Maurice murders Hurrish.

Another interesting character is the mentally diminished Thady-na-Taggart, described as “the idiot or ‘natural’ of Tubbamina.” The author comments that “Village idiots, once common institutions in England, are now scarce,” blaming that fact on increased civilization. Readers are told that “The ‘natural’ only does rather better what every one else does more or less—namely as little as possible.” But when Thady does act, his actions prove crucial. In an early confrontation between Hurrish and Mat, Mat dangles his enemy’s dog, the well-drawn terrier Lep, over cliffs above the ocean. Hurrish knows he can never rescue his beloved pet, but then suddenly “a wild tatterdemalion figure, with white vacant face, starting eyes, and long lank hair streaming in the wind” grabs Mat around the legs and rescues little Lep. Thady remains reminiscent of Shakespeare’s fools, who often prove his dramas’ wisest characters. In his rescue of the freely loved Lep, who returns affection without judgment, Thady seems to tell his fellow Irish that love must be given freely, without expectations, if it is to prove of any value. Following Hurrish’s death, Thady adopts Lep, and the two characters, symbolic of a sane loyalty and affection, live their patient lives out together.

As Hurrish lies dying, the narrator labels him a “martyr to a not very glorious cause,” one certainly not worth his life. He was “dying because Hate of the Law is the birthright and the dearest possession of every native son of Ireland.” This statement continued to ring true, as “the Irish question” remained unanswered into the 21st century. While to modern readers, Lawless’s superb descriptions and relentless conflict development prove her novel’s most attractive aspects, her confused English readers in 1887 received the book as news from a battlefield whose bloodshed they grappled to understand. Lawless’s attempts to elucidate the life of the Irish linked her with other regional writers of the day, most notably Margaret Oliphant, who did the same with the Scottish, and to whom Lawless dedicated Hurrish.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Mulkerns, Val. Introduction to Hurrish, by Emily Lawless.
Belfast: Apple Tree Press, 1992, vii–x.