Meet outside National Gallery entrance, Clare Street at 11 am. Duration 90 minutes, price 17 euro. On again Saturday, 15 February. In just a small part of Dublin city, are deep connections to the lives and works of three major international writers, as well as other poets, painters and rebels.
Writer Eamon Delaney takes us on a walking tour of Westland Row, and north Merrion Square and talks about these fascinating links. We learn about life from to , the path to Irish independence and the origins of great works of art.
There will be readings throughout. We begin on Clare Street where the young Samuel Beckett below lived and wrote his first novel. We move to the former Finns Hotel, where James Joyce first encountered the love of his life Nora Barnacle on 16 June , a date he later immortalised in his novel Ulysses. Padraic and his brother Willie were executed after the Easter Rising. We see the houses where Oscar Wilde below lived and hear about his life and work.
This was the conflict which followed the Easter Rising, and the War of Independence. Across the road, we see the reminder of another bitter conflict : the Moyne Institute in Trinity, named after the Anglo Irish diplomat assasinated in Cairo by hardline Zionists to prevent a settlement in Palestine.
We go along Merrion Square, and pass the home of Mary Swanzy, famous in artistic Paris for her modernist paintings example below. Paris is a common theme on this tour and was very influential in the work of Beckett, Joyce, Wilde and Swanzy. Finally, we proceed to Holles Street Maternity Hospital, and the setting for possibly the most difficult scene in Ulysses β the Oxen of the Sun chapter. But it is also one of the most entertaining, being composed of a mish mash of different English styles β romantic, Middle English and American slang β which Eamon will read from.
