Book description
In 1895 twenty-six-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 emerge,
riding a white horse. But then her badly burned body was found in a
shallow grave. Her husband, father, aunt and four 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 episode, set in the last decade of the
nineteenth century, we witness the collision of town and country, of
storytelling and science, of old and new. The torture and burning of
Bridget Cleary caused a sensation in 1895 which continues to
reverberate more than a hundred years later.
Winner of the Irish Times Prize for Non-Fiction
Angela Bourke is the author of
By Salt Water
and
Maeve Brennan: Homesick at the New Yorker
. 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.
