Terence Dooley – författare

A fascinating collection of letters from the great English novelist – and prolific correspondent – Penelope Fitzgerald.Acclaimed for her exquisitely elegant novels – including the Booker Prize-winning ‘Offshore’ – and superb biographies, Penelope Fitzgerald was one of the finest British authors of the last century. Published here for the first time are her collected letters. An unparalleled record of the life of this greatly admired writer, these letters reveal her most important family relationships and friendships, and paint a clear picture both of herself and of her correspondents. They show us how she managed her own career – according to her own convictions – and how determined she was to put her world view across. A fascinating portrait of Penelope Fitzgerald as a mother, as a friend and as a writer, these letters give the same pleasure they gave to those who first opened them.Penelope Fitzgerald was one of the most distinctive voices in British literature. The prize-winning author of nine novels, three biographies and one collection of short stories, she died in 2000.

The gripping story of the tumultuous destruction of the Irish country house, spanning the revolutionary years of 1912 to 1923During the Irish Revolution nearly three hundred country houses were burned to the ground. These “Big Houses” were powerful symbols of conquest, plantation, and colonial oppression and were caught up in the struggle for independence and the conflict between the aristocracy and those demanding access to more land. Stripped of their most important artifacts, most of the houses were never rebuilt, and ruins such as Summerhill stood like ghostly figures for generations to come.Terence Dooley offers a unique perspective on the Irish Revolution, exploring the struggles over land, the impact of the Great War, and why the country mansions of the landed class became such a symbolic target for republicans throughout the period. Dooley details the shockingly sudden acts of occupation and destruction—including soldiers using a Rembrandt as a dart board—and evokes the exhilaration felt by the revolutionaries at seizing these grand houses and visibly overturning the established order.

"'Down from the mountain they forbade us swarm frantic men, brandishing their manuals of transcendental reason.' The mountain is of course Mount Olympus, and the frantic men Spain's all-male poetry establishment bent on excluding women from all their activities. 'Not to confront them,' continues Erika Martinez, 'would be to bow one's head in shame in front of one's own mirror.'Women poets have only been published in numbers in Spain in the last 25 years and still account for only 15% of the poetry books published every year. The Premio Nacional de Poesia has been awarded 52 times and been won by a woman 4 times. It isn't at all uncommon for influential anthologies to be all-male or include at most one or two women among twenty men. Women are usually absent from the lists of the most venerable publishers. The founder of Visor, Jesus Garcia Sanchez, known affectionately as Chus Visor, recently declared in El Mundo's culture supplement: '...women's poetry doesn't bear comparison to men's. There wasn't an important woman poet in the whole of the twentieth century and there isn't one now.'This neglect and disdain (gradually diminishing in the new generation) and the consequent delay in the appearance of Spanish women poets in translation was one of the motives for this anthology, but to bring their musical, lucid, forthright poems to English readers is its principal intent." -from Terence Dooley's Afterword to this volumeThis is the first anthology of its kind to appear in the UK, and features ten poets: Pilar Adon, Martha Asuncion Alonso, Graciela Baquero, Mercedes Cebrian, Maria Eloy-Garcia, Berta Garcia Faet, Erika Martinez, Elena Medel, Miriam Reyes and Julieta Valero - one born in the 1960s, six in the 1970s and three in the 1980s.

While the land question from the mid-Victorian period to the eve of the First World War plays a prominent role in Irish historiography, historians have tended to overlook its importance in post-independence Ireland and have generally assumed that there was no land question after 1922. Terence Dooley debunks this myth. In this first systematic analysis of the land question in independent Ireland, he contends that agrarian agitation proved to be an important stimulus to political revolution during the period 1917 to 1923. He assesses the dangers which agitation posed for the Provisional Government after 1922 and argues that the 1923 Land Act not only ended agrarian agitation but also made a major contribution to ending the Civil War. Dooley emphasises the significance of Irish Land Commission to Irish rural life in an extensive analysis of the working of the Land Commission after its reconstitution in 1923. The commission became the most important (and controversial) government body operating in independent Ireland.It acted as a facilitator of social engineering, compulsorily acquiring lands from traditional landlords, large farmers, graziers and negligent farmers and passing them on to smallholders, ex-employees of acquired estates, evicted tenants and their representatives, members of the pre-Truce IRA and the landless. It migrated over 14,500 farmers onto lands totalling almost 400,000 acres. The continued hunger for land and the impact of land acquisition and division on so many people ensured that the land reform question remained one of the most potent political issues until the early 1980s.

While the land question from the mid-Victorian period to the eve of the First World War plays a prominent role in Irish historiography, historians have tended to overlook its importance in post-independence Ireland and have generally assumed that there was no land question after 1922. Terence Dooley debunks this myth. In this first systematic analysis of the land question in independent Ireland, he contends that agrarian agitation proved to be an important stimulus to political revolution during the period 1917 to 1923. He assesses the dangers which agitation posed for the Provisional Government after 1922 and argues that the 1923 Land Act not only ended agrarian agitation but also made a major contribution to ending the Civil War. Dooley emphasises the significance of Irish Land Commission to Irish rural life in an extensive analysis of the working of the Land Commission after its reconstitution in 1923. The commission became the most important (and controversial) government body operating in independent Ireland.It acted as a facilitator of social engineering, compulsorily acquiring lands from traditional landlords, large farmers, graziers and negligent farmers and passing them on to smallholders, ex-employees of acquired estates, evicted tenants and their representatives, members of the pre-Truce IRA and the landless. It migrated over 14,500 farmers onto lands totalling almost 400,000 acres. The continued hunger for land and the impact of land acquisition and division on so many people ensured that the land reform question remained one of the most potent political issues until the early 1980s.