Download The Story of Ireland by Emily Lawless. A 1896 historical non-fiction work about Irish history, legend, invasion, settlement, political struggle, cultural memory, national identity and Lawless's accessible Victorian account of Ireland's past. Available in PDF, EPUB, MOBI and AZW3 formats.
About The Story of Ireland
The Story of Ireland by Emily Lawless is a 1896 historical non-fiction work about Irish history, legend, invasion, settlement, political struggle, cultural memory, national identity and Lawless's accessible Victorian account of Ireland's past. Ideal for readers interested in Irish writing, historical non-fiction, garden writing, nature observation, Victorian and Edwardian prose, place, memory and reflective literary non-fiction.
Genre: Historical Non-fiction
Why Read The Story of Ireland?
The Story of Ireland is worth reading because it shows Lawless as a historical writer, trying to make Ireland's long, difficult and contested past readable for a broad audience. First published in 1896, the work is concerned with Irish history, legend, invasion, settlement, political struggle, cultural memory, national identity and Lawless's accessible Victorian account of Ireland's past. Lawless writes with a strong sense of place, whether she is describing the intimate world of a garden or the much larger historical landscape of Ireland.
Readers may value the title for its combination of accessibility and seriousness. Lawless does not treat observation as passive. Plants, seasons, roads, ruins, legends, weather, political events and remembered places all become ways of thinking about time. Her writing often asks how a person comes to understand a place by attending to its changes, its difficulties and the stories that have gathered around it.
The book is also useful for understanding late Victorian and Edwardian writing by an Irish woman whose interests crossed fiction, history, feminism, nature, national memory and social observation. Modern readers should approach period assumptions critically, especially where national identity, class, empire, gender or historical interpretation appear. Even so, the work remains valuable because it records a thoughtful, literary effort to make place intelligible through narrative.
This title adds to the larger Emily Lawless collection by showing another aspect of a writer whose work joined personal attention with public meaning. The Story of Ireland can be read for history, nature writing, literary style and Irish cultural context, but it is especially rewarding because Lawless makes observation feel morally and imaginatively active. Her prose suggests that patient looking is one way of resisting simplification.
