Kirjahaku

In March 1895, twenty-six-year-old Bridget Cleary fell ill, then disappeared from her cottage in rural Tipperary. Even before she vanished, rumors circulated that she was a changeling, left behind by fairies or evil spirits. The "real" Bridget would return on a white horse. Then her badly burned body was discovered in a shallow grave, and her husband, father, aunt, and four cousins were arrested and charged with her murder." "This is an exquisite if disturbing book that takes no sides when it comes to judging whether a belief in the supernatural is foolish and dangerous superstition or a reality of life at the end of the nineteenth century, and which illustrates how the politicization of a crime is hardly a new product of the twentieth.

Born in Dublin in 1917 to politically active parents, Maeve Brennan's childhood in Ireland was moulded by the cultural ideologies of nationalism and lit by the creative energy of the Abbey and Gate theatres.

While many Irish-Americans identify the Great Famine of the mid-nineteenth century as the pivotal event in their ethnic history, most people in Ireland knew little about it as its 150th-anniversary approached. The Great Famine continued from 1845 at least until 1852, with lesser, locally devastating, famines occurring at intervals: most notable was the so-called 'Little Famine' of the late 1870s, which led to the formation of the Land League, and then to the Land War of the 1880s. Famine commemorations began in 1995 and ended in 1997, however, suggesting that the effects of mass hunger, destitution, and widespread premature death could now safely be consigned to scholarship, sculpture and oblivion. Intense social change in Ireland since the 1990s has coincided with new work by scholars and artists to raise awareness of the unacknowledged trauma suffered by those who survived famine, and by their descendants. Famine has left many traces in a landscape now best known through tourism. Less well known or understood, however, are its many reverberations in the minds and imaginations of individuals, families and communities.

In 1895 twenty-six-year-old Bridget Cleary disappeared from her house in rural Tipperary. At first, some said that the fairies had taken her into their stronghold in a nearby hill, from where she would emerge, riding a white horse. But then her badly burned body was found in a shallow grave.