Product Description

This selection of letters is drawn from women from every background - the big houses of the Anglo-Irish gentry, small farms scattered throughout the countryside, urban slums and middle-class houses. They tell of Irish women's concerns, their sorrows and joys, their friendships and their thoughts on contemporary issues. Maud Gonne McBride writes to W.B. Yeats in 1916; Nora Barnacle declares her love to her future husband - James Joyce; Irish emigrant Mary Cumming tells her sister about her voyage; and other less well-known women exchange thoughts on their day-to-day lives and the times through which they lived.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1671078 in Books
• Published on: 1999-05-20
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages

Review
Lawrence Flanagan includes women of Irish birth, marriage or parentage in his entertaining collection of letters ranging from St Brid writing from a 5th-century convent to a letter dated 1980 from an Irish girl in a Japanese Buddhist temple. There are love letters from Nora to James Joyce and Kitty Kiernan to the rebel Michael Collins. Social gossip from Maria Edgworth to her sister-in-law, and family news from the Bronte sisters to one another. Political letters include Countess Markiellicz describing conditions in a British prison, Maud Gonne lamenting Ireland's tragic history to W B Yeats and Helen Waddell urging Stanley Baldwin to stand up to the Nazis. A splendid miscellany, essentially Irish but reflecting women's experience through the ages. (Kirkus UK)