The strange story of Sarah Kelly Ireland Irish history Roscommon Westmeath Signed

Vera Hughes.
1997. Second edition, revised, enlarged, and amended. 213 pages in cloth covered boards with dust jacket.
Illustrated and with 2 genealogical charts.
150 X 220 MM.
Dust jacket has edge wear and a small edge tear to top of front flap. A small indented mark to the front is also visible to front board. The book has some wear to spine ends and folds to corners of a few pages. Otherwise a good, clean, and well bound copy.
Signed by the author to front free endpaper.

Born Sarah Birch in 1801 at Broadstairs, Kent, she was abducted and seduced, as a teenager, by a wealthy profligate from Ireland, named Meredith, and taken to Dublin, where she was abandoned, together with her infant son.

After years of street-wise destitution, Sarah met and married Edmund Kelly, a wealthy attorney and land-agent, thirty-five years her senior, from Kiltoom, Co. Roscommon. On his death in 1845 she inherited his vast wealth, but had to endure years of litigation in Irish courts, before his will was proved in her favour.

A harsh and cruel, if able landlord, she carried out several evictions of her tenants, and was murdered at Ballinderry, Moate, Co. Westmeath in April 1856.

In this factual and fascinating account of her life, the story does not end with Sarah Kelly’s death, and the varying fortunes of the relatives from Kent, who inherited her houses and estates in Ireland, have been followed right up to the present day.
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