Never Call It Loving — Dorothy Eden

This is the story of Kitty O'Shea, married woman whose love affair with Charles Stewart Parnell in the late nineteenth century led to the famous Irish patriot's downfall.

Told as a fictional biography, the author has been assisted in her sympathetic and understanding portrait of heroine by discovering Katherine O'Shea's own published account of her passionate and unshakeable love and loyalty of Parnell.

The stormy days of Gladstone and the Home Rule Bill for Ireland form a lively background to this most moving and tragic story.

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"Unless you can muse in a crowd all day on the absent face that fixed you...
Unless you can die when the dream is past,
Oh, never call it loving."

With these words began the magnificent love affair that scandalized nineteenth-century England. From the moment they met, Charles Parnell, "uncrowned King of Ireland," and Katharine O'Shea, beautiful young wife of one of his Irish colleagues, were swept up into a turbulent, overpowering love which brought them public scorn and private grief. Dorothy Eden's story of star-crossed lovers "exudes on every page an aura of the feverish passion which these two anything-but-prim Victorians felt for each other and which made them run such astonishing risks." Publisher's Weekly