Patrick Pearse: The Triumph of Failure.
Author: EDWARDS, Ruth Dudley.
Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2006. xxiv, 384 pages. Illustrated. Paperback.
There has always been argument about whether Pearse’s leadership of the Easter Rising in 1916 represented a failure or a triumph. Pearse, who on Easter Monday was proclaimed President of the Provisional Government and Commander-in-Chief of the Army of the Irish Republic, took on himself the most bitter of roles at the finish: he was the first to make the move to surrender - and he was the first to be executed.
In this re-issued sympathetic, balanced, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, to which she has written a new preface, Ruth Dudley Edwards places this remarkable man in his historical, political and cultural context. She tells the story of his glorious but never quite successful ventures, including his struggles to save the Irish language and inspire a new epoch in Irish literature, and the foundation of his remarkable, radical school. She examines his role as an educational, political and social thinker as well as propagandist and military leader, and in her account of his extraordinary life, does full justice to all its intrinsic irony, absurdity, idealism and courage.
ISBN: 0716528355
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