by Orna Ross | Jun 11, 2021 | Fiction |
The story opens in 1916. The world is at war, Irish freedom fighters have just staged an armed rebellion in Dublin, and the three characters we first met in Her Secret Rose are deeply unsettled. The world famous poet, WB Yeats, “having come to 50 years” has decided...
by Orna Ross | Jun 7, 2021 | Fiction |
John MacBride was a soldier in South Africa for a few years, fighting with the Boers (Dutch settlers) against the English over who would take the land from the tribal peoples who lived there. There were Irish on both sides and it gave rise to this ditty, which was...
by Orna Ross | May 31, 2021 | Fiction |
Maud Gonne's father, Tommy, was a Cavalry Major, which was how the English born Maud ended up living in Ireland, when he was posted there. In 1879, he was posted to India, and the motherless Maud and her sister Kathleen were moved to relatives in the South of France....
by Orna Ross | May 29, 2021 | Fiction |
There is a new online biography of Maud Gonne for children, created by Sophie Harkin for Lottie.com. Unfortunately, a few of the details are wrong — Maud founded “L'Irelande Libre” in the 1890s, not 1910s, and she never won a Nobel peace prize (that went...
by Orna Ross | May 26, 2021 | Fiction |
Pay no attention to the criticism of men who have never themselves written a notable work. Consider the discrepancies between the actual writing of the Greek poets and dramatists, and the theories of the Graeco-Roman grammarians, concocted to explain their metres....
by Orna Ross | May 24, 2021 | Fiction |
Ezra Pound had many famous sayings. The one that has always been most useful to me is “literature is news that stays news”, a reminder to concentrate on what's lasting, perhaps even permanent, in the human condition. The husband of the artist Dorothy...