Desart, The Earl of
Entry updated 3 October 2022. Tagged: Author.
Title of UK author William Ulick O'Connor Cuffe (1845-1898), styled Viscount Castlecuffe until he assumed the earldom at the age of 20 in 1865. He signed all his books "The Earl of Desart"; several of the stories assembled as Love and Pride on an Iceberg and Other Stories (coll 1887) are sf, at least two of them anticipating with comic apprehension a Near Future in which women are emancipated (his widow became the first woman Senator in the Irish Free State after its founding in 1922). Cuffe's only sf novel, The Raid of the "Detrimental": Being the True History of the Great Disappearance of 1862; Related by Several of Those Implicated and Others; And Now First Set Forth (1897), describes a Lost World in the South Atlantic transformed by its UK inhabitants into an advanced Utopia. He died aboard his yacht. [JC]
William Ulick O'Connor Cuffe
born Grosvenor Crescent, Middlesex: 10 July 1845
died Falmouth Harbour, Cornwall: 15 September 1898
works
- Love and Pride on an Iceberg and Other Stories (London: Swan Sonnenschein, Lowrey and Co, 1887) [coll: pb/]
- The Raid of the "Detrimental": Being the True History of the Great Disappearance of 1862; Related by Several of Those Implicated and Others; And Now First Set Forth (London: C Arthur Pearson, 1897) [hb/]
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