The Irish Are Everywhere

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Happy St. Patrick's Day, readers!

My heroine Ursula of Mercies of the Fallen and Ursula's Inheritance found her Irish born champion in Rowan Buckley, an Irish transplant to Canada during An Gorta Mor, (The Great Hunger 1845-1850.)

Rowan was a member of an Irish diaspora (Diaspóra na nGael), which describes people like me, and I suspect many of you-- ethnic Irish descendants who live outside the island of the saints and sinners. There are over 100 million of us...more than fifteen times the population of Ireland itself!

Did you know:

* It has been suggested that St. Brendan visited Bermuda on one of his legendary voyages. The beautiful Bermudiana is a flower that grows only there...and around Lough Erne and Lough Melvin in County Fermanagh, and is known as Feilistrín gorm, or Blue-eyed grass.

*  On the Bridge of Tears (Droichead na nDeor) in West Donegal, Ireland, family and friends of emigrants would accompany them as far as the bridge before saying goodbye, while the emigrants would continue on...

* Many of the Wild Geese (expatriate Irish soldiers of the 16th, 17th and 18th century) who had gone to Spain and their descendants continued on to its colonies in South America. Many rose to positions in the Spanish governments there. In the 1820s, some helped liberate the continent. Bernardo O'Higgins was the first Supreme director of Chile. When Chilean troops occupied Lima during the War of the Pacific in 1881, they put in charge Patricio Lynch, whose grandfather came from Ireland to Argentina and then moved to Chile. Other Latin American countries that have Irish settlement include Puerto Rico and Colombia.

Brave Enough for Happy Ever After?

 

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It’s that time of year again, when pundits come up with lists of the most important love stories of all time…You’ll often find these make the grade:

Romeo and Juliet (1597) by William Shakespeare

Anna Karenina (1877) by Leo Tolstoy

Doctor Zhivago (1957) by Boris Pasternak

Love Story (1970) by Erich Segal

The Notebook (1996) by Nicholas Sparks

Bridges of Madison County (1992) Robert James Waller

Cold Mountain (1997) Charles Fraizer

The Great Gatsby(1925) by F. Scott Fitzgerald

What do they have in common, dear readers? Here’s my list:

1.They are written by men

2. Things don’t end well.

Now, let’s consider:

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (1813)

Jane Eyre (1847) by Charlotte Bronte

Gone With The Wind (1936) by Margaret Mitchell

Yes. Written by women, and.... everybody gets to survive. Even the heroine of problematic Gone With the Wind is left with the Pandora’s Box gift of hope. 

Why are there so many modern Jane Austen variations? So many sequels to popular HEA (Happy Ever After) romances? Why does Lizzy solve mysteries and the Bennet sisters battle zombies? 

Because romantic happy ever afters are not dead ends of grief and regret (and, as in those crazy kids Romeo and Juliet: bad timing).  

Happy Ever Afters leave us to imagine the future. Did the lovers make good parents? How did they handle the slings and arrows of life? Did they grow stronger together? In short, were they brave enough for their Happy Ever After? 

So… give me Jane Austen’s Emma and and Lizzy. Give me Charlotte’s indomitable Jane, and Shakespeare’s Beatrice and Rosalind and Portia.  They are brave enough to last through a long and wonderful life with their heroes.