ABSTRACT
Miss Eily O’Connor takes its name from the heroine of Dion Boucicault’s sensation melodrama The Colleen Bawn. The original play opened at Laura Keene’s Theatre in New York City in March 1860, and received its London premiere at the Adelphi six months later. The author and his wife, Agnes Robertson, took the roles of Miles na Coppaleen and Eily O’Connor in both productions. The play ran for nearly three hundred nights in London, earning the dramatist and his wife the princely sum of £23,000. Based upon Gerald Griffin’s novel The Collegians (1829), the melodrama centers on the clandestine marriage of Hardress Cregan, an Anglo-Irish gentleman, and Eily O’Connor, an Irish peasant girl. Despising his wife’s brogue and provincial dialect, the snobbish Hardress turns against her when he realizes that he must marry the wealthy Anne Chute to save his family estate. Although Hardress only contemplates killing Eily, his crippled servant Danny Mann—his sinister shadow, as it were—devises a murderous plot. Danny lures the distressed Eily to a remote lake, where, after she refuses to hand over the only copy of her marriage certificate, he tries to drown her. Miles, stumbling upon them, wounds Danny and pulls Eily out of the water. He keeps her in seclusion, biding his time until he reveals the full truth. Meanwhile, Hardress, who knows nothing of these events, mistakenly believes that Eily committed suicide after he deserted her. Only now does he realize the extent of his love for her. Tormented by guilt, he confesses everything to Anne Chute just as they are about to wed. The police then arrive to arrest Hardress for ordering Danny to commit murder. During the hastily arranged judicial proceedings Miles brings in the alleged victim herself. To everyone’s astonishment, she is very much alive. Eily offers to renounce her marriage vows to Hardress, but at last he chooses to publicly embrace her as his wife.
