In Great Haste: The Letters of Michael Collins and Kitty Kiernan - Softcover

Michael John Collins

4.47

38 ratings by Goodreads

9780717123988: In Great Haste: The Letters of Michael Collins and Kitty Kiernan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0717123987 ISBN 13: 9780717123988

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998

View all copies of this ISBN edition:

Even seventy years after his death, Michael Collins remains a colossus of modern Irish history. During the five years before he died, Collins grew particularly close to Kitty Kienan of Grandard in County Longford. Harry Boland also expressed warm affection for Kitty in several letters, but it was the relationship between Michael and Kitty that developed and they planned to marry. They exchanged more than 300 letters which revealed not only their intimacy, but also the extraordinary pressure under which Collins lived during the tempestuous days of 1921 when the terms of the Anglo-Irish Treaty were being hammered out. A sequence of letters from London in May 1922 shows him near the breaking point. Kitty's letters in turn are full of concern about the life of strain Michael is forced to live and its looming physical danger. Both of them wish for a normal life in marriage.

This new and splendidly designed edition contains, for the first time, facsimile reproductions of the letters and includes correspondence first discovered in 1994. It is being published to coincide with the release of a major motion picture on Michael Collins, wirtten and directed by Neil Jordan, starring Liam Neeson and Julia Roberts and based upon the relationship between Michael and Kitty.

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

About the Author:

Lion O Broin was a distringuished writer, broadcaster, historian and public servent. He died in 1990.

CIan O Heigeartaigh is a journalist and television producer.

From Publishers Weekly:

Collins (1890-1922) is remembered as the man who outfoxed the British in the Irish War of Independence, led the hard-nosed negotiations that resulted in the eventual establishment of the Irish Republic and became head of state at the age of 31. This book looks at him in a startling new light. We don't see Collins the brutal revolutionary, but rather the man in love as he conducted the affairs of an embryo nation. This volume contains 315 letters between Collins and his fiancee, Kitty Kiernan, a hotel keeper from County Longford. It shows him in a very human state: as one of the most important men in Ireland, he apologizes for not writing because "I had no stamps." We find that Collins attended daily mass during the treaty negotiations in 1921, always lighting a candle for Kiernan; we see him so exhausted that he was always thinking of getting some sleep; and we learn that he allowed Kiernan to call him "Ducky"?probably the most innocuous sobriquet ever bestowed upon him. The late O Broin, a historian, and O hEigeartaigh, a journalist and TV producer, show Collins as a very humble, earnest man, with only the best interests at heart for both Kiernan and the Irish state.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.