Citizen Lord: The Life of Edward Fitzgerald, Irish Revolutionary

Rating:
Summary: Lyrical History
Review: In her writing,Stella Tillyard manages to span the difficult gap that separates fiction from non-fiction. Her style is lyrical - almost like a historical fiction - but without the emotive judgement. I find that it makes her books highly evocative and very easy reading.

However that should not lead people to think she has a flare for dubious tabloid presentation. She is quite ruthless in ensuring that her facts are correct, and in 'Citizen Lord' she has stripped away many of the romantic layers that have concealed the true story of Lord Edward Fitzgerald. These were myths that had been spread by Lord Edward's family following his death, and have coloured his story since. The stripping away of these layers makes this book no less interesting, indeed the true story still very much romantic and tragic.

A younger son of the first Duke of Leinster and his wife Emily, a daughter of the Duke of Richmond, Lord Edward was born into privelege and influence. Tillyard traces his gradual move from this life, to one of revolutionary in Ireland of 1798 without descending into either pathos or into judgement.

I was first introduced to Tillyard's writing with her first book, 'Aristocrats' which is also available at Amazon. I would recommend this book as also worth reading, and gives marvellous background to 'Citizen Lord' - it is about his mother, Lady Emily Lennox, and her three sisters.

I think Tillyard is a "Must Read!"

Rating:
Summary: Lyrical History
Review: In her writing,Stella Tillyard manages to span the difficult gap that separates fiction from non-fiction. Her style is lyrical - almost like a historical fiction - but without the emotive judgement. I find that it makes her books highly evocative and very easy reading.

However that should not lead people to think she has a flare for dubious tabloid presentation. She is quite ruthless in ensuring that her facts are correct, and in 'Citizen Lord' she has stripped away many of the romantic layers that have concealed the true story of Lord Edward Fitzgerald. These were myths that had been spread by Lord Edward's family following his death, and have coloured his story since. The stripping away of these layers makes this book no less interesting, indeed the true story still very much romantic and tragic.

A younger son of the first Duke of Leinster and his wife Emily, a daughter of the Duke of Richmond, Lord Edward was born into privelege and influence. Tillyard traces his gradual move from this life, to one of revolutionary in Ireland of 1798 without descending into either pathos or into judgement.

I was first introduced to Tillyard's writing with her first book, 'Aristocrats' which is also available at Amazon. I would recommend this book as also worth reading, and gives marvellous background to 'Citizen Lord' - it is about his mother, Lady Emily Lennox, and her three sisters.

I think Tillyard is a "Must Read!"

Rating:
Summary: Lord Edward, hero and mama's boy
Review: You'll have to look elsewhere for a full picture of the catastrophic Irish rebellion of 1798, but Ms, Tillyard paints a lovely picture of its most romantic leader. I first heard of Lord Edward as a teenager, dipping into Yeats and reading Lord Edward's name linked to Wolfe Tone and Robert Emmet..."that wild delirium of the brave...". I have read numerous accounts of '98 since, but found little about Lord Edward in them, save for the melodrama of his arrest and death-an extra-judicial murder, if ever there was one.

So I am grateful for Ms. Tillyard's rendering of the man himself. She gives ample proof of the sweetness of his character, showing how his inborn beauty was nurtured and how it blossomed under the doting care of his formidable and unconventional mother. Their tenderness for each other lights what otherwise is a stark and tragic story. More significantly it gives the lie to the masculinist theory that maternal love weakens and "feminizes" male children. True, young Lord Edward had a "strong male role model"-his tutor, who was also his mother's adulterous lover!-but every step of Mr. Ogilvie's tutelege was directed by the attentive and indulgent Duchess of Leinster. The letters between Lord Edward and the Duchess make lovely reading for any mother concerned with the making of boys into men.

Of course, Ms. Tillyard includes the apparently obligatory expressions of horror about "political violence" a phrase used only in reference to Lord Edward's revolutionary enterprise, not to the ongoing repression and dispossession of the native Irish. Taken against the whole of the book, however, this is only a minor stupidity, one so ubiquitous in books about Ireland published since 1969 that Republican readers can pass over it without undue offense.

The main thing is that Lord Edward Fitzgerald lives on these pages as a beloved and loving human being, worthy of all the praise heaped upon him over the centuries. How often does a shining name in history still shine under close inspection?

Anna Bradley