born 1841, Belfast, Co. Antrim. The family was Catholic, and most of the men were physicians. At first she intended to be a painter, but she met Charles Dickens, who was impressed with her writing and persuaded her to concentrate on it. He published her story ‘Not to be taken at Bed-time' in All the Year Round, and wrote 'To Be Taken with a Grain of Salt' as a companion piece. After a period helping her husband's researches and raising a family, she produced several popular 'social' novels: Mulholland married Sir John Gilbert, the antiquary and historian of Dublin, and much of the work they did together on Irish folk-lore finds its way into her books. Her sister married Lord Charles Russell of Killowen, the first catholic Attorney-General of England in 300 years. Mulholland's constant theme is the emergence of a Catholic Irish gentry, as good as — and differing little from — the Protestant Anglo-Irish sort. Her attitude might be summed up as "We are Victorian gentlefolk of Irish persuasion." Allied to this is her protrayal of the Irish as merely another variety of Englishmen, quaint perhaps, but no more so than Yorkshiremen. She has a strong sense of the Celtic past as something to be expiated and tamed, though not altogether lost. Perhaps the logic of this position, developed over the years, was why in the end she seemed to abandon hope in this English connection and approach nationalism (when it became fashionable in society) — if "we" are as good as "they" are, then "they" are no better than "we" are. She died in 1921, during the War of Independence. Mulholland is strongly influenced by J. S. LeFanu and William Carleton, as well as by Dickens; she has more than a touch of Gaskell about her. Although "Not to be taken at Bed-time" surfaces in anthologies from time to time, she is little read today.