Brenda Maddox Books

"Many know the public Yeats but few have managed to penetrate to the inner man, or to explore the relationship with his much younger wife, George." "George's Ghosts looks at Yeats through the lens of the Automatic Script, the trance-like communication with supposed spirits that George conducted during the early years of their marriage. The full transcript of this intense occult adventure was not available until 1992 and remains virtually untouched by biographers. Maddox finds the Script to have been a ghostly form of family planning - as well as one of the most ingenious ploys ever used by a wife to take her husband's mind off another woman."--BOOK JACKET

Nora was twenty years old and penniless when she eloped from Ireland with Joyce, a man of brilliant promise but few accomplishments whom she'd known but three months. She remained with him until his death thirty-seven years later, bearing him two children, governing a succession of unruly households in Trieste, Paris, and Zurich, holding him and the family together through the force of her own formidable pluck. Most importantly for Joyce's work, Nora served as his "portable Ireland," his living link to the homeland he used as the basis for his masterpieces.

In 1962, Maurice Wilkins, Francis Crick, and James Watson received the Nobel Prize, but it was Rosalind Franklin's data and photographs of DNA that led to their discovery. Brenda Maddox tells a powerful story of a remarkably single-minded, forthright, and tempestuous young woman who, at the age of fifteen, decided she was going to be a scientist, but who was airbrushed out of the greatest scientific discovery of the twentieth century.