The Evil Eye

In rural County Waterford, William Carleton's The Evil Eye turns Ireland's old belief in the destructive power of a hostile glance into a tale of grief, vengeance, and uneasy superstition. A once-friendly circle of neighbors and kin is split by cruelty, inheritance, and suspicion: the warm, witty Lindsay household is poisoned by Mrs. Lindsay's bitterness, while the gentle Goodwins remain marked by affection and domestic peace. At the center stands Mr. Hamilton, a devoted widower whose beloved daughter Agnes and her intimate friendship with Alice Goodwin bring tenderness to a family shadowed by hereditary illness and dread. As Agnes's beauty and innocence give way to fatal decline, Hamilton's loss becomes unbearable. After her death, he adopts Alice as his own and later dies longing for reunion, but his will unleashes a bitter legal and emotional feud that hardens old resentments between the families. The novel then widens into darker, more comic scenes of wakes, stormy roads, and conjurers, where mourners, fortune-tellers, and desperate women expose the gullibility, vanity, and raw need beneath folk belief. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.