author
Samuel Murray Hussey
b. 1824
Remembered for a lively memoir of 19th-century Ireland, this Kerry land agent wrote with the ease of a natural storyteller. His book offers a firsthand view of rural life, local conflict, and the tensions of the Land War era.
1 Audiobook
The Reminiscences of an Irish Land Agent
by Samuel Murray Hussey
About the author
Born on December 17, 1824, Samuel Murray Hussey was an Irish land agent with strong family ties to County Kerry. He is best known as the author of The Reminiscences of an Irish Land Agent, a memoir published in 1904 that grew out of the stories and recollections for which he was already well known.
Hussey’s writing is valued less as polished literary autobiography than as vivid firsthand testimony. In it, he looks back on country life in Ireland, his work as a land agent, and the unsettled political climate of the late 19th century, including the years of agrarian agitation and violence that shaped his career.
He died in 1913. For readers today, his memoir remains a colorful and sometimes controversial window into the social history of Ireland, told by someone who stood close to the center of local power and conflict.