Page:Notable Irishwomen.djvu/224

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NOTABLE IRISHWOMEN.

you wretched ten years hence. Youth is made to wish and dream, and life to deny youth's dreams and wishes. When I was 17, how I would have scorned my present happiness, how I would have annihilated it, if I could! Truly, I may bless Providence that I was denied my will, and compelled to follow a road I hated, no pleasant one, but a path full of briars, and where many a time I stopped, foot-sore and bleeding."

In 1857 a. very disagreeable episode occurred in Julia Kavanagh's life. Her father, who still persisted in writing, and had brought out another bulky work on philology—"Myths, Traced to their Primary Source through Language"—now thought fit to trade on his daughter's literary fame. On the title-page of a worthless novel of his, "The Hobbies," he put the name of Julia Kavanagh along with his own. In a letter to the Athenæum she indignantly denied any share in it, while the publisher, on his side, maintained that he was under the impression that she had. The truth seems to be that she had seen the novel in manuscript, and had suggested one or two alterations. The correspondence showed that the relations between father and daughter had become very much strained, and that Morgan Kavanagh wished to push his novel into popularity by associating his daughter's name with or without her consent. After this we hear no more of him, and "The