Annie Keary

The memoir tells how Eliza accompanied the frail Annie to Egypt after her bereavements and disappointment in love, then to Cannes for research for her books, where the healthy climate agreed with her and she spent much time in later years.

Success as a novelist came with Sidney Grey: A Tale of School Life (1857), which drew local colour from the grimy brick kilns on the edge of Trent Vale.

[3] Annie Keary branched out in 1859 into adult fiction with Through the Shadows (1859), but literary acclaim had to wait until her novel Castle Daly: The Story of an Irish Home Thirty Years Ago (1875), which was reprinted several times up to the end of the 1880s.

Like her earlier work for adults, it shows signs of being stretched to fill the three volumes required by publishers in those days, although the characterizations and sense of place are strong.

Her collaborator Eliza later wrote the fantasy novel The Magic Valley (1877), which also has fairy-tale elements It was issued in abridged form as part of a schools series, in about 1912, along with poetic adaptations of Annie Keary's fairy tales.

She also wrote poetry and collaborated with her sister Eliza and their niece Maud on Enchanted Tulips and Other Verses for Children, but this seems not to have been published until 1914.

Her Little Seal-Skin and Other Poems (1874) was poorly reviewed at the time, but has received attention since: Ellis calls her "a strikingly promising and important female poetic voice that was tragically muted.

Her nephew Charles Francis Keary (1848–1917), was also an acclaimed author of both realist and weird fiction, and a cataloguer for numismatic studies.