Discover and read the best of Twitter Threads about #NollaigNamBan
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Joyce's "The Dead" takes place today 6 January, the feast of the Epiphany, la festa della Befana. Joyce turns the usual comforting Christmas tale of new life, new hope, into a meditation on the darker and more painful side of the season marked by death, memory, loss. Thread 
"The Dead" corrects some of the bleakness of the earlier stories in Dubliners. Joyce wrote that he had "been unnecessarily harsh" in not reproducing any Dublin's "ingenuous insularity and its hospitality. The latter “virtue” so far as I can see does not exist elsewhere in Europe"
Joyce wrote this extraordinarily mature winter's tale when he was just 25. Part of its inspiration came from a tough Christmas he and Nora spent in Rome in 1906. Christmas dinner, he complained, was just an uninspiring plate of pasta.
Louisa Westropp (born 1858), following a marriage characterised by constant domestic violence, sued her husband for divorce on the grounds of cruelty. Before Irish independence, cruelty was, in theory, legal grounds for divorce.....
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#IrishWomenInHistory #NollaigNamBan
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#IrishWomenInHistory #NollaigNamBan
..... but men were considered to have the right to physically 'chastise' their wives, as women at that time had few rights (including the right to custody of their own children) cruelty was almost never cited in #divorce proceedings.
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#IrishWomenInHistory #NollaigNamBan
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#IrishWomenInHistory #NollaigNamBan
It was the first time an #Irish #woman sued her husband for divorce on grounds of cruelty, and it set a legal precedent. Terrible as things were for Louisa, they were much worse for women from less wealthy backgrounds.
3/9
#IrishWomenInHistory #NollaigNamBan #LegalTwitter
3/9
#IrishWomenInHistory #NollaigNamBan #LegalTwitter
Françoise Henry was born in Paris in 1902 & grew up in #France, where she studied art & archaeology. She came to Ireland in 1926 to research her thesis on Irish medieval carving, & became deeply fascinated with early Christian #Irish stonework and art.
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#IrishWomenInHistory
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#IrishWomenInHistory
From 1932 - 1974, Françoise worked for @ucddublin, during which time she published a number of major works on Irish art from the prehistoric period to mediaeval times.
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#IrishWomenInHistory #NollaigNamBan #Art #Archaeology
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#IrishWomenInHistory #NollaigNamBan #Art #Archaeology
Her work helped to raise awareness of the richness of this artistic tradition and laid the ground for future researchers in the field. Françoise went on to become the Director of Studies in #archaeology and the #history of #European #painting.
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#IrishWomenInHistory
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#IrishWomenInHistory
On #NollaigNamBan we'll be raising a glass/cup of tea to all the women we've featured this year, to honour their victories and challenges as well as their long and short lives. What will you do? Here's a thread with some ideas.
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#IrishWomenInHistory
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#IrishWomenInHistory
1) If you have children in your life, you could spend some time with them telling stories about your and/or their female ancestors. Keeping their stories alive in the most traditional of Irish ways; through storytelling.
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#NollaigNamBan #IrishWomenInHistory
2/7
#NollaigNamBan #IrishWomenInHistory
2) If you're on your own, maybe take some time to reflect on your own female ancestors - do you know much about them? What pieces of stories are missing and why? Is there some research you'd like to do to know more about them?
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#IrishWomenInHistory #NollaigNamBan
3/7
#IrishWomenInHistory #NollaigNamBan
Joyce's great story, "The Dead" takes place today 6 January, feast of the Epiphany. I look forward to discussing it this evening @IrlEmbRome. An endlessly rich story for our times, it turns the comforting Christmas tale of new life into a meditation on death, memory, loss. Thread
It corrects or seems to correct some of the bleakness of the earlier stories. Joyce wrote that he had "been unnecessarily harsh" in not reproducing any Dublin's "ingenuous insularity and its hospitality. The latter 'virtue' so far as I can see does not exist elsewhere in Europe".
It offers a wonderful evocation of hospitality and a luscious description of the laden Christmas table "A fat brown goose lay at one end of the table and at the other end, on a bed of creased paper strewn with sprigs of parsley, lay a great ham, stripped of its outer skin ...
