Eibhear Walshe – författare

This is the first contemporary edition of the scholarly writings of Jane Wilde, known as Speranza (1821–1896) and William Wilde (1815–1876), an edition of their selected poems, translations, travel writings, medical observations, literary criticism, folklore and political commentary. This project engages with contemporary scholarly interest in Wilde studies and on the influence of Ireland within the work of Oscar Wilde. As writers, intellectuals and Irish nationalists, Speranza and William Wilde themselves were key in the awakening of the Celtic Imagination with their innovative and ground-breaking work as scholars, folklorists and cultural historians of Gaelic traditions. The reputations of both Speranza and William Wilde suffered with their son’s disgrace and he was himself keenly aware of their impressive nature of their achievements, writing in his prison testament De Profunds, “She and my father had bequeathed me a name they had made noble and honoured, not merely in literature, art, archaeology, and science, but in the public history of my own country, in its evolution as a nation.” This anthology reclaims the writings of Speranza and William Wilde as part of the public history of Ireland in the nineteenth century.

This is the first contemporary edition of the poetry of Jane Wilde, née Elgee, who also wrote as Speranza. Speranza was, in her time, renowned worldwide, with essays, poetry and translated work published in Ireland, England, America and beyond. She was a key figure in the nationalist Young Ireland movement of the 1840s, and her poetry records the hardship experienced by the Irish people - famine and migration in particular. She was also an early advocate for women’s rights, who campaigned for the admission of women to higher education. This edition, which contains several previously unpublished poems, will make the poetry of this emblematic figure in nineteenth-century Irish writing accessible to a contemporary audience for the first time.

This anthology of the Irish writings of the Anglo-Irish novelist, Elizabeth Bowen 1899-1973 gathers together, for the first time, her Irish writings including her lectures, essays, reviews and reports and includes an extensive introductory essay by the editor as well as annotations and a critical bibliography . Her family had been settled in Farrahy in North Cork for nearly two hundred years by the time of her birth in 1899 and her fictions reflect this long and difficult history between landlord and landscape. As she wrote in her family history Bowen's Court (1942) 'The land outside Bowen's Court's windows left prints on my ancestors eyes that looked out: Perhaps their eyes left, also, prints on the scene? If so, those prints were part of the scene to me'. In all of these Irish writings, Bowen looked homewards to North Cork as a place of stability and loyalty in an endangered world and her vision of Anglo-Ireland becomes her talisman, her source for imaginative power and stability in war-disordered London.This edited collection charts her illuminating relationship with the new Irish state from her perspective as an Anglo-Irish novelist and provides an account of her life-long engagement with her own country from 1929 until the late 1960s..

This is the first contemporary edition of the scholarly writings of Jane Wilde, known as Speranza (1821–1896) and William Wilde (1815–1876), an edition of their selected poems, translations, travel writings, medical observations, literary criticism, folklore and political commentary. This project engages with contemporary scholarly interest in Wilde studies and on the influence of Ireland within the work of Oscar Wilde. As writers, intellectuals and Irish nationalists, Speranza and William Wilde themselves were key in the awakening of the Celtic Imagination with their innovative and ground-breaking work as scholars, folklorists and cultural historians of Gaelic traditions. The reputations of both Speranza and William Wilde suffered with their son’s disgrace and he was himself keenly aware of their impressive nature of their achievements, writing in his prison testament De Profunds, “She and my father had bequeathed me a name they had made noble and honoured, not merely in literature, art, archaeology, and science, but in the public history of my own country, in its evolution as a nation.” This anthology reclaims the writings of Speranza and William Wilde as part of the public history of Ireland in the nineteenth century.