JUNE 1849: Dr William Wilde, passing a wretched hovel in Dublin’s Liberties, discovers James Clarence Mangan in a state of misery and squalor. Aged just 46, the man dubbed ‘Ireland’s National Poet’ is about to succumb to the cholera epidemic that is gripping famine-ravaged Ireland. AUGUST 2008: Writer Bridget Hourican encounters Mangan during a Liberties lock-in with that other great Irish poet, Shane Mac Gowan, who found inspiration in Mangan’s poetry. Who was this Baudelaire of the Liberties, this lurker in Irish history whose enigmatic presence helped determine its course?Alcoholic, opium addict, Romantic, Famine poet, Dublin street character, hero of James Joyce. For biographer Bridget Hourican an encounter with the mercurial James Clarence Mangan quickly leads to obsession. The surviving biographical material scant, subjective, sometimes falsified both fascinates and frustrates her, and she becomes determined to find him. The lines between research and real life become blurred, and Bridget starts to notice aspects of her life bleeding into Mangan’s. An obsession becomes a haunting, and she realises that the only way to truly reach Mangan is to reckon with her own ghosts. Absorbing, witty and deeply researched, Finding Mangan resurrects Ireland’s most enigmatic literary figure, restoring him to his rightful place in the national consciousness. ‘Imaginative and absorbing, at last Mangan has found the perfect biographer’ John Banville’A new, shapeshifting approach to biography It reads like a dream’ Roy Foster’The only enjoyable thing I’ve read on Mangan. A spirited, original approach to this most fascinating and elusive poet’ Jacques Chuto, general editor of The Collected Works of James Clarence Mangan
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