The early twentieth-century Irish novelist Fr. Joseph Guinan (1863–1932) came from a strong farming family in County Offaly. After attending Maynooth, from 1881 through 1888, Guinan spent five years in Liverpool following his ordination. After some years teaching in St. Mel's College, Longford, which he left owing to failing health, Guinan served as a curate in several parishes until he was appointed parish priest of Bornacoola, County Leitrim, in 1910 Dromod. In 1920 he became a canon and transferred to Ardagh, where he remained until death. Today, Guinan is chiefly remembered as an imitator of a better-known priest-novelist, Canon Sheehan. Guinan's writing, like Sheehan's, appeared initially in such American Catholic outlets as the magazine Ave Maria published from the University of Notre Dame. Between 1903 and 1928, Guinan published eight novels. Guinan also published a Catholic Truth Society of Ireland pamphlet titled The Famine Years (1908), and a collection of essays, Months and Days (c. 1920–23) modeled on Sheehan's Under the Cedars and the Stars (1903). Historians of clerical attitudes in early twentieth-century Ireland have made use of Guinan's works. The only extensive literary analysis of them is Catherine Candy's Priestly Fictions: Popular Irish Novelists of the Early Twentieth Century (1995). 

Guinan is not given sufficient credit as a social observer (he gives a much clearer sense of rural poverty than Sheehan); nor does Candy distinguish sufficiently between their attitudes to Protestantism. Sheehan, though somewhat condescending, sometimes portrays Protestants who deserve respect. Guinan had been a curate in Liverpool (with its strong Orange-Green divide) then spent the rest of his ministry in Longford, where Orangeism survived into the 1920s (several Orangemen appear in his novels). He was savagely hostile to Protestantism. In his novel Annaghmore a Catholic who marries a Protestant ascribes her children’s deaths to the wrath of God; Guinan insinuates that she is correct.

 

WorksFiction

  • Scenes and Sketches in An Irish Parish, or Priests and People in Doon (Dublin: Talbot 1903): and Do. [4th edn.] (M. H. Gill 1906), and Do. [6th edn.] (Dublin: Gill 1925);
  • The Saggarth Aroon (NY: Benizer 1906; Dublin: [n.pub.] 1925), Do. (Dublin: Talbot 1945) [var. 1944]; ran to four editions in its first year
  • The Moores of Glynn (London: Burns, Oates & Washbourne; NY: Benizer 1907);
  • The Island Parish (Dublin: M. H. Gill 1908);
  • Donal Kenny (Dublin: [n. pub.] 1910);
  • The Curate of Kilcloon (Dublin: Talbot 1912) [see extracts];
  • Annamore, or The Tenant at Will (London: Burns & Oates 1924);
  • The Patriots (NY: Benizer 1928).

Miscellaneous

  • The Will and the Way, by Irish Priests (Dublin: Gill 1915) [infra]; essays incl. two by Joseph Guinan, ‘Priests and People of Ireland’, and ‘Apostles of the Press’ [see short quotation, infra].
  • Months and Days: Their Silent Lessons (Dublin: CTS [1920]), and Do., rev. & enl. 2nd edn. (Dublin: CTS 1925).