On Easter Monday, 1916, Irish rebels poured into Dublin's streets to
proclaim an independent republic. Ireland's long struggle for
self-government had suddenly become a radical and bloody fight for
independence from Great Britain. Irish nationalists mounted a
week-long insurrection, occupying public buildings and creating
mayhem before the British army regained control. The Easter Rising
provided the spark for the Irish revolution, a turning point in the
violent history of Irish independence.
In this highly
original history, acclaimed scholar R. F. Foster explores the human
dimension of this pivotal event. He focuses on the ordinary men and
women, Yeats's "vivid faces," who rose "from counter
or desk among grey / Eighteenth-century houses" and took to the
streets. A generation made, not born, they rejected the inherited
ways of the Church, their bourgeois families, and British rule. They
found inspiration in the ideals of socialism and feminism, in new
approaches to love, art, and belief.
Drawing on fresh
sources, including personal letters and diaries, Foster summons his
characters to life. We meet Rosamond Jacob, who escaped provincial
Waterford for bustling Dublin. On a jaunt through the city she might
visit a modern art gallery, buy cigarettes, or read a radical
feminist newspaper. She could practice the Irish language, attend a
lecture on Freud, or flirt with a man who would later be executed for
his radical activity. These became the roots of a rich life of
activism in Irish and women's causes.
Vivid Faces
shows how Rosamond and her peers were galvanized to action by a
vertiginous sense of transformation: as one confided to his diary, "I
am changing and things around me change." Politics had fused
with the intimacies of love and belief, making the Rising an event
not only of the streets but also of the hearts and minds of a
generation.