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9781843512462

Cowslips and Chainies

By: Elaine Crowley

Publication Date: October 2011

(1 customer review)

6.50

Cowslips and Chainies by Elaine Crowley is a poignant memoir of childhood in 1930s and early ’40s Dublin. Best-selling novelist Elaine Crowley’s account of tenement life is by turns hilarious and intensely sad. Her beloved, consumptive father – generous, handsome and fickle – works at the local undertakers. Her proud, resourceful mother, struggling with privation, alternates slaps with kisses in a turbulent relationship with young Nella.

Through the eyes of a natural storyteller, we enjoy scenes from a receding past vividly enacted: the teeming life of the Iveagh Market; the street-games and domestic strife; the stratagems for survival among pawnbrokers and money-lenders. We share in Crowley’s wide-eyed witness of a pre-school plot to murder the neighbour’s toddler, the excitement of the 1932 Eucharistic Congress, the trauma of leaving the Liberties for a Corporation house on the city fringe, attempts at sex education thwarted by nuns, her first job in the sewing factory at the age of fourteen, an outing to foil her father’s ‘carryings on’, and his moving death from TB in the early part of 1942.

Cowslips and Chainies is infused with wonder and particularity, and conveys an overwhelming love of place and persons. It is a classic of Irish autobiography.

‘In this gently nostalgic memoir, novelist Crowley (Dreams of Other Days; A Family Curse) recalls her youth in the hardscrabble, blue-collar milieu of Dublin prior to WWII. Crowley portrays a tranquil childhood though her home life, captured here with loving strokes, was hardly easy. ‘ Publishers Weekly

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Elaine Crowley, who came late to writing, achieved instant success with her novels Dreams of Other Days (1984), The Man Made to Measure (1986), Waves Upon the Shore (1989) The Ways of Women (1993) and A Family Cursed (1996).

PLEASE NOTE THIS TITLE IS OUT OF PRINT. THE EBOOK IS AVAILABLE BELOW.

 

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1 review for Cowslips and Chainies

  1. Lilliput Press

    “I loved this book. It reminded me of how life was in the l930’s. Also brought back many of my own memories of growing up in the l940’s. Wonderfully written! So down to earth and so funny and yet quite sad! A mixture of everything” ANNE BELTON

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ISBN
9781874675808
Weight 0.5 kg
Dimensions 136 × 215 mm
Publication Date

October 2011

Format

Paperback, 228pp