|
|
Angela Bourke
The Burning of Bridget Cleary
Published January 1999 by Pimlico at £10.00
ISBN: 0712665900
In 1895 26-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 shortly emerge, riding a white horse. But then her body was found in a shallow grave. Her husband, father, aunt and cousins were arrested and charged, while newspapers in nearby Clonmel, and then in Dublin, Cork, London and further afield attempted to make sense of what had happened.
In this lurid and fascinating incident, set in the dawn of the twentieth century, we witness the collision of town and country, of superstition and scepticism, of old and new. The torture and burning of Bridget Cleary caused a sensation in its own time and continues to reverberate more than 100 years later.
Angela Bourke is the author of The Burning of Bridget Cleary: A True Story (winner of several awards, including the Irish Times Literature Prize for Irish Non-Fiction), and By Salt Water. Born in Dublin, where she still lives, she has spent long periods in the USA, and has held visiting academic positions at Harvard University, Boston College and the University of Minnesota. A leading scholar in interdisciplinary Irish Studies, Angela Bourke writes in Irish and English, and makes frequent appearances on television and radio. She is Senior Lecturer in Irish at University College Dublin, The National University of Ireland, Dublin.
