The Furys Chronicle

The Furys Chronicle is a sequence of five novels, published between 1935 and 1958, by James Hanley (1897–1985). The main setting is the fictional, northern, English town of Gelton, which is based on Liverpool, where Hanley was born, and involves an Irish Catholic family of seafarers, similar to Hanley's own. The action takes place between 1911 and 1927. The first novel in the series, The Furys, was Hanley's sixth novel.

Originally conceived as a trilogy, this sequence of five novels by the Liverpool born writer of Irish descent, James Hanley, chronicles the lives of the Furys, an Irish immigrant family, in the fictional northern English town of Gelton "a fictional counterpart of Liverpool". These novels were published over a period of more than twenty years (1935–58) and cover the period from 1911 until 1927. The series is based on Hanley's own experiences of growing up a Catholic of Irish descent in a city divided by sectarian tensions. The father, Denny (Dennis) Fury, had been a stoker on ships, as had Hanley's father. Both Hanley's parents were born in Ireland, his father Edward Hanley in Dublin, like Denny Fury, and his mother, Bridget Roache, in County Cork, like Fanny Fury.

Hanley was fourteen in 1911 so that would have been around the time he left school and started work as a clerk.

With regard to the family's name "Fury", John Fordham suggests, that "Hanley was aware of the classical allusion", and, that "[w]hile there are no exact parallels with Aeschylus, the novel consistently evokes the Oresteian original": "The Furys, like the house of Atreus, are accursed, symbolic of a once proud family or nation"

No date is given, but the action takes place over three or four weeks a few years before World War I. The strike that takes place in the novel, with its accompanying scenes of violence, appears to be based on the 1911 Liverpool general transport strike, also known as the '"great transport workers' strike", which involved dockers, railway workers and sailors, as well people from other trades. This took place in 1911, and paralysed Liverpool commerce for most of the summer.

The editors of the Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics edition of The Furys, and some critics, confuse the strike that occurs in the novel with the 1926 General Strike. The third novel in the series, Our Time is Gone, is set during World War I.

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