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Boston Writer Elizabeth O'Reilly wrote Classic Travel Book in 1922, How France Built Her Cathedrals



One of the most extraordinary travel books about France was written by Elizabeth Boyle O’Reilly (1874-1922) of Charlestown, Massachusetts, the daughter of celebrated Boston Irish poet and editor, John Boyle O'Reilly and writer Mary Murphy O'Reilly. 

How France Built Her Cathedrals: A Study in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries (1921) was published by Harper Publishing in July, 1921, in New York City, where O'Reilly was living in her final years. The 600 page book, with illustrated drawings by A. Paul De Leslie, was based on O'Reilly's extensive research and travels throughout France.


Title Page: How France Built Her Cathedrals

"Of living interest to the erudite devotee of the arts and to the person who simply enjoys, in books or travels, the wonderful and beautiful things that have come from the hand of man," wrote the Boston Herald. 

Book Illustration: Notre Dame du port of Clermont-Ferrand

Published a few years after World War I ended, O'Reilly castigated the German military forces for bombing the Notre Dame Cathedral in the City of Reims, writing, "The destruction of Rheims Cathedral was planned deliberately and in cold blood it was carried out. No military excuse for the crime is possible. On September 17-18, 1914, the church was riddled with projectiles...over 500 of them struck the mammoth church."  The church was bombed multiple times throughout the war. 

The New York Tribune praised O'Reilly's book.  "It is heartening to see that the author, as everyone who hereafter forevermore writes of Rheims should do, confirms against the eternal infamy of having wantonly, with malice aforethought, ravaged and all but annihilated that peerless shrine....It was a noble thing for Elizabeth Boyle O'Reilly to undertake this elaborate study of the French cathedrals, which is at once history, description and interpretation."

O'Reilly, who was alternately called Eliza and Bessie, studied at Radcliffe College, which her sister Mary Boyle O'Reilly also attended, and spent many years abroad in Europe and Japan. 

Earlier in her writing career, O'Reilly also published a selection of verse, My Candle and Other Poems (1903) and Heroic Spain (1910). Both books were critically acclaimed. 

"The author of this volume of verse is a daughter of John Boyle O'Reilly and, therefore, comes of her gift by right of inheritance. Her lines are always flowing with a smooth and even current; her themes are serious, and they are given a serious treatment," wrote Boston Evening Transcript about her poetry.

"The point of view taken of Heroic Spain by Miss O'Reilly is different from that handed down to us from the days of Elizabeth in which the Spanish people are apt to be painted in colors that are not always attractive. Miss O'Reilly, on the contrary, gives a sympathetic estimate of the Iberian peninsula and its people, drawing her materials chiefly from the less traveled region of the Peninsula where the dominant characteristics of old Spain are still said to flourish," wrote The New York Times. 

An obituary in the Fall River Daily Evening News noted that O'Reilly "had served as a Red Cross nurse in France during the World War and later was attached to the American Ambulance at the Hotel Imperial hospital at Nice."

She is buried at the O'Reilly family plot at Holyhood Cemetery in Brookline with her parents and sisters. 

Research, Photos + Text, Michael Quinlin


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