Before seriously embarking upon his medical studies, Lever visited Canada as an unqualified surgeon on an emigrant ship, and has drawn upon some of his experiences in Con Cregan, Arthur O'Leary and Roland Cashel.

Arriving in Canada, he journeyed into the backwoods, where he was affiliated to a tribe of Native Americans but had to flee because his life was in danger,[1] as later his character Bagenal Daly did in his novel The Knight of Gwynne.

[1] In 1833 he married his first love, Catherine Baker, and in February 1837, after varied experiences, he began publishing The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer in the recently established Dublin University Magazine.

During the previous seven years, the popular taste had turned toward the "service novel", examples of which include Frank Mildmay (1829) by Frederick Marryat, Tom Cringle's Log (1829) by Michael Scott, The Subaltern (1825) by George Robert Gleig, Cyril Thornton (1827) by Thomas Hamilton, Stories of Waterloo (1833) by William Hamilton Maxwell, Ben Brace (1840) by Frederick Chamier and The Bivouac (1837), also by Maxwell.

Before Harry Lorrequer appeared in volume form (1839), Lever had settled - on the strength of a slight diplomatic connection - as a fashionable physician in Brussels (Hertogstraat 16).

Lever had never taken part in a battle himself, but his next three books, Charles O'Malley (1841), Jack Hinton (1843), and Tom Burke of Ours (1844), written under the spur of the writer's chronic extravagance, contain some splendid military writing and some of the most animated battle-pieces on record.

In June 1842 he welcomed at Templeogue, four miles southwest of Dublin, the author of the Snob Papers on his Irish tour (the Sketch Book was, later, dedicated to Lever).

But the "Galway pace", the display he found it necessary to maintain at Templeogue, the stable full of horses, the cards, the friends to entertain, the quarrels to compose and the enormous rapidity with which he had to complete Tom Burke, The O'Donoghue and Arthur O'Leary (1845) made his native land an impossible place for Lever to continue in.

In the Knight of Gwynne, a story of the Union (1847), The Confessions of Con Cregan (1849),[5] Roland Cashel (1850) and Maurice Tiernay[6] (1852) we still have traces of his old manner; but he was beginning to lose his original joy in composition.

[citation needed] Depressed in spirit as Lever was, his wit was unextinguished; he was still the delight of the salons with his stories, and in 1867, after a few years' experience of a similar kind at Spezia, he was cheered by a letter from Lord Derby offering him the more lucrative consulship of Trieste.

They include The Fortunes of Glencore (1857), Tony Butler (1865), Luttrell of Arran (1865), Sir Brooke Fosbrooke (1866), Lord Kilgobbin (1872) and the table-talk of Cornelius O'Dowd, originally contributed to Blackwood's.

Death had already given him one or two runaway knocks, and, after his return to Trieste, he failed gradually, dying suddenly, however, and almost painlessly, from heart failure on 1 June 1872 at his home, Villa Gasteiger.

He was a born raconteur, and had in perfection that easy flow of light description which without tedium or hurry leads up to the point of the good stories of which in earlier days his supply seemed inexhaustible.

With little respect for unity of action or conventional novel structure, his brightest books, such as Lorrequer, O'Malley and Tom Burke, are in fact little more than recitals of scenes in the life of a particular "hero", unconnected by any continuous intrigue.

His women are mostly roués, romps or Xanthippes; his heroes have too much of the Pickle temper about them and fall an easy prey to the serious attacks of Poe or to the more playful gibes of Thackeray in Phil Fogarty or Bret Harte in Terence Denville.

According to the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition: Superior, it is sometimes claimed, in construction and style, the later books lack the panache of Lever's untamed youth.