Foster, Lydia Mary (1867–1943), writer and schoolteacher, was born in Newmills, Co. Tyrone in 1867, fourth of six children (three sons and three daughters) of James Foster, presbyterian minister of Newmills congregation 1850–90, and his wife Lydia (née Harkness), from a presbyterian clerical family. Lydia was educated at home before being sent as a boarder to Miss Black's school in Hollywood, Co. Down (returning home at weekends).
Of the six children, the youngest son emigrated to Canada soon after his father's death, while the eldest, Nevin, became manager of the Hillsborough Weaving Company (Co. Down) and a long-term contributor of nature notes to the Northern Whig. Lydia and her sisters Jane and Bessie (Susan Elizabeth) moved to Belfast, where they established a girls' school in the southern suburbs after Bessie graduated from TCD in modern languages in 1896. The school took girls and boys, day pupils and boarders; it was located successively at Myrtlefield Park, at 434 Lisburn Road, and in Maryfield Park. Jane and Lydia taught music (Lydia is listed as a music teacher in the 1901 census) and possibly other subjects. Their brother Henry, who worked in a Belfast hardware store, lived with his sisters; none of the four siblings married. All four were regular attenders at Malone Presbyterian Church and inherited their father's commitment to the temperance movement. (Lydia, who suffered from progressive deafness, caused amusement by standing up at a temperance meeting after mistaking a call for converted drunkards to testify for a request for questions from the audience.)
After some decades of modest success, the school closed following the deaths of Bessie (December 1917) and Jane (October 1918). Henry's death in December 1922 left Lydia alone, in straitened circumstances, and almost completely deaf. In order to support herself, she turned to writing literary sketches and dialect verse for various publications, including the Northern Whig, the Dublin-based story paper Ireland's Own, and (during the second world war) the annual miscellany Ulster Parade. Some of this material was collected in the book Tyrone among the bushes (1933). She also wrote plays, but these do not seem to have been collected or professionally produced. Foster's reputation chiefly rests on three longer books set in the Tyrone of her parents' time and her own childhood, published by the Belfast-based Quota Press which published several exponents of the Ulster offshoot of the Scottish 'kailyard' school of literature. (Being published by a local publisher reflected the fact that this genre, celebrating and sentimentalising rural and small-town community values and a tolerant presbyterianism, had lost the wider popularity it enjoyed in Edwardian Britain.)
The burning bush (1931) (the bush is the emblem of the Irish presbyterian church) follows a young man in mid-nineteenth century Ulster, from his initial decision (in a scene mildly reminiscent of William Carleton's (qv) story The poor scholar) to become a minister despite his small-farmer father's opposition to both his career choice and to his marriage to a neighbouring minister's sister. It was widely read in Ulster and praised even by Dublin newspapers; Aodh de Blacam (qv) cited it as evidence that Ulster protestants were essentially a moral and religious rural people little different from Irish catholics. The book retained some long-term popularity among conservative presbyterians and was reprinted in Belfast in 2016 with a brief introduction by Colin Walker and a glossary of dialect terms.
Manse larks (1936) describes the adventures of six children in a nineteenth-century rural presbyterian manse (minister's house) and incidentally displays Foster's abiding fondness for dogs and cats. (She was a staunch supporter of the RSPCA and also helped Dr Barnardo's homes for children; the principal companion of her later years was a dog named Stewart.) Elders' daughters (1942) describes the romantic longings and misadventures of a number of nineteenth-century Tyrone characters, including calculating farmers and the daughters of congregational elders who take an old-fashioned view of paternal authority. As Lydia's health declined, she dictated the last chapters of Elders' daughters to a married niece with whom she had gone to live at Hollowbridge House near Hillsborough after the Belfast blitz of April 1941. The book went through two editions before her death at the home of her niece, 'Hollowbridge', near Hillsborough, Co. Down on 13 December 1943.
Foster retained a lifelong attachment to Newmills, which she frequently revisited; she laid the foundation stone for the new manse in 1910 and campaigned successfully against a proposal to merge the impoverished congregation with another. At her own request she was buried beside the meeting-house, near her parents and siblings.
While Foster displays a sharp eye for the incidentals of late nineteenth-century presbyterian worship and deploys a certain ironic humour at the courting habits of elderly presbyterian ministers, the resistance of older clerics to the growing vogue of teetotalism (The burning bush features a moderator who decries total abstinence as an eccentric singularity when attending a presbytery dinner and is carried home at the end of the evening) and the passions formerly aroused by long-settled issues such as the use of instrumental music in worship, her version of kailyard remains essentially loyal to orthodox presbyterianism. (She continued to attend Malone Church even when unable to hear the service.) References to Henry Cooke (qv) (whom her father regarded as a mentor) are uniformly favourable, and the 1859 revival (for which Reverend Foster also displayed great enthusiasm) is taken at face value. Although the great famine took place during the timespan of The burning bush, it is not mentioned. (Her father ministered to cholera patients while working for the Belfast town mission during the famine; including such an episode would have enhanced the heroic stature of his fictional counterpart but disturbed the book's overall mood of nostalgia.)
The catholic-protestant divide is almost completely glossed over by comparison with nineteenth-century tensions between presbyterianism and the Church of Ireland (this may explain why Foster was praised by catholic-nationalist as well as presbyterian critics), though one story in Tyrone among the bushes features an Orangeman who is rescued by a catholic neighbour when he falls into his own flax-pond after 12 July celebrations. The harder edge of nineteenth-century poverty is minimised, although a character in Elders' daughters dies of tuberculosis; while Foster's amusement at the mercenary courtship practices of male farmers seems inspired by Jane Austen, she lacks Austen's awareness that the women courted might also be influenced by material motives.
Though Foster had genuine talent, it seems clear that part of the attraction of her books lay in their evocation of an idealised rural presbyterian past for an interwar audience painfully aware of recent political divisions, sectarian violence and industrial decline. For Foster, isolated by her deafness and conscious she had outlived all her siblings, the children's return home from quarantine in Belfast at the end of Manse larks and the conclusion of Elders' daughters with the return of a prodigal daughter to reconcile with her family and marry the presbyterian minister who loved her all along also symbolise her own hopes for reunion with her loved ones in the afterlife.