A Victorian woman writer whose voluminous fiction has escaped canonization, Mary Anne Sadlier was famous in her day for didactic, sentimental romances promoting the causes of Catholicism and Irish culture in North America. Henry J. Morgan (early editor of biographical dictionaries) and Thomas D'Arcy McGee (her lifelong friend, whose poems she edited for publication upon his death) both thought her unsurpassed as author of "the romance of Irish immigration." A characteristic blend of pious Catholic precepts and hard-earned awareness of the plight of unschooled immigrant girls, her American novels are particularly worth a second glance. The Irish historical romances, for their part, found an appreciative audience and, together with the Bible and Catholic school texts, helped create the prosperity of her husband's and brother-in-law's publishing firm, D. & J. Sadlier and Company. Mary Anne Sadlier joined well-known authors such as Susanna Moodie and more prolific but less famous writers...