Terence Brown Books

James Joyce's first published book, which he wrote when he was still in his twenties, Dubliners is far removed from the bold experimentalism of his later work, but is essential for understanding the author's development as a writer, and endures as a masterly example of the short-story form. Although ranging considerably in tone, mood and milieu, the fifteen short stories included in this collection all centre around the city of Dublin and its inhabitants at the beginning of the twentieth-century. From the unsettling adventure of two truant schoolboys to the crafty schemes of two con-men, from a young woman's refusal to abandon Ireland and elope with a sailor to a man's moment of clarity during an annual dance party, these stories offer a moving portrait of an entire world and era which has all but disappeared.

The key to Brown's interpretation of Yeats is magic. Yeats had a lifelong interest in magic, spiritualism and the paranormal. Brown argues with great force that it is this preoccupation which lies at the root of his personality and which is the key to so much else. His hatred of late Victorian materialism informed not just his poetry but also his involvement with the Irish nationalism cause. For all his Irish nationalism, however, there was also an 'English Yeats to which Brown gives very full attention. The poet was formed by his English experience as much as his Irish, and he lived nearly half his adult life in London. Brilliantly written, Terence Brown's biography is the most complete and unified picture yet published of Ireland's greatest poet.

W. B. Yeats is widely regarded as the greatest English-language poet of the twentieth century. This new critical biography seeks to tell the story of his life as it unfolded in the various contexts in which Yeats worked as an artist and as public figure.