 |
  |
|
|
Hibernia
|
||
A facsimile reprint in the Hibernia series chosen and introduced by John Kelly ISBN 1 85477 216 3 200 x 127 mm 492pages |
WILLIAM CARLETON The Black Prophet: William Carleton (1794-1869) was born in Co. Tyrone, the son of a peasant who supported fourteen children on a small farm. Carleton was educated mainly at unofficial ‘hedge schools’. He abandoned plans for the priesthood for a literary life in Dublin, where he became a Protestant, making a precarious living as a writer. His conversion to Protestantism, and the anti-Catholic bias of some of his work, made him a controversial figure, but no contemporary Irish novelist could match his knowledge of the Irish peasantry and their culture, and Yeats described him as 'the great novelist of Ireland, by right of the most Celtic eyes that ever gazed from under the brows of storyteller'. The Black Prophet centres upon an unsolved murder and the love affair between the niece of the victim and the son of his supposed killer, and the plot unfolds against the background of the famine and typhus epidemic of 1817, which Carleton had witnessed at first hand. £45 $75 |
|
  |
||
