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Throughout history, the stories of women’s lives and work have been overshadowed by those of men. Wives, especially, disappear, unacknowledged as patrons and champions of their husbands’ work, as collaborators, muses, carers and managers of the family domain. Great Irish Wives shines a spotlight on ten such wives: Matilda Tone, Mary O’Connell, Constance Wilde, Charlotte Shaw, Emily Shackleton, Annette Carson, Sinéad de Valera, Margaret Clarke, George Yeats and Beatrice Behan. The men in this book are household names, from Theobald Wolfe Tone and Daniel O’Connell to Oscar Wilde and Brendan Behan, and they all have one thing in common: they married women who enabled them to pursue their dreams, even if that meant courting death or outrage. Author Nicola Pierce brings these remarkable women to life.
Nicola Pierce is an author of historical books, including Titanic: True Stories of Her Passengers, Crew and Legacy and O’Connell Street: The History and Life of Dublin’s Iconic Street. She published her first novel, Spirit of the Titanic, to rave reviews, and her second novel, City of Fate, transports the reader deep into the Russian city of Stalingrad during the Second World War. Behind the Walls, set in the besieged city of Derry in 1689, was followed by Kings of the Boyne, also set in seventeenth-century Ireland during a defining moment in history. Nicola then delved deep into the story of explorer Francis Crozier and the Sir John Franklin Arctic North West Passage expedition, in her haunting novel Chasing Ghosts, and took the reader to Australia during the Great Famine in nineteenth-century Ireland with In Between Worlds, a novel of the journey of the Famine girls to the New World. Originally from Tallaght, Nicola lives in Drogheda, Co. Louth.