SOURCE: A review of Mother Ireland, in The Critic, Vol. XXV, No. 2, Winter, 1976, pp. 72-3.

In the following review, Broderick offers a highly unfavorable assessment of Mother Ireland.

It is surely no coincidence that most of the Irish writers who have lived out of the country have felt the urge to write about their relationship with the land of their birth. One thinks of Lady Morgan, a trashy novelist and the Edna O'Brien of her day; Thomas Moore, whose Memoirs in the form of letters and correspondence were edited by Lord John Russell; Sean O'Casey, George Moore, Kate O'Brien, Mary Colum and Oliver Gogarty. I seem to remember that Shaw wrote some pages of autobiography in extreme old age; while Elizabeth Bowen published a history of the Shelbourne Hotel, which was part of her youth. Yeats, who spent a far greater amount of time in England than he...