Lifespan: 1825-1879
Nationality: Irish
Genres: Romantic Period
Types of Work: Novels, poems, children's stories
Contemporaries:
Style:
Bio:
(from Wikipedia)
Born at the rectory in Bilston, now called Bilton-in-Ainsty, Yorkshire, Annie was the daughter of a former army chaplain, William Keary, who came from County Galway in Ireland, and his wife, Lucy Plumer, of Bilton Hall. She was educated at home. She suffered from poor health and slight deafness.
Her father later became incumbent of Sculcoates, near Hull, and simultaneously of Nunnington in North Yorkshire, where the family moved. Then, when Annie was twenty, came another move to Clifton near Bristol, due to her father's declining health. Their relationship was close, and her father gave her much of the information about Ireland that she would later incorporate into her novels. Keary moved in 1848 to keep house for a widowed brother in Staffordshire, who had three children. Six happy years came to an end when her brother remarried. Soon after, she lost two other beloved brothers, and a long engagement was broken off.
Annie's sister Eliza Harriett Keary (1827–1918) also took to writing, particularly poetry, and wrote a memoir of Annie after her death in Eastbourne in 1879.
The memoir relates how Eliza accompanied the frail Annie to Egypt and to Cannes to do research for her books. The sisters also helped to run a home for unemployed servant girls in Pimlico. They were befriended by the novelist Charles Kingsley and his family. The dominant considerations in her life were family ties. She nursed her mother in her last illness in 1869 and later looked after four young cousins whose parents were in India.
Novels:
Through the Shadows
Castle Daly
Oldbury
A Doubting Heart