Fenians: The Irish and America

In the shadow of famine and empire, a generation of Irish men and women rose to challenge the power that had broken their country.Among them was John Boyle O'Reilly, poet, soldier, Fenian, convict, escapee, journalist, and one of the great Irish-American voices of the nineteenth century.Transported across the world to a brutal penal colony in Western Australia, O'Reilly escaped aboard an American whaling ship and remade his life in Boston, where he became editor of The Boston Pilot, a fierce advocate for justice, and a leading figure in Irish-American political and literary life.Yet freedom never released him from the past. Haunted by his impossible love for Jessie Woodman, the daughter of an English prison warden, and driven by loyalty to the imprisoned Fenians still held in Australia, O'Reilly helped lead one of the most daring rescue missions of the age, the voyage of the Catalpa.Spanning Ireland, Australia, and America, Fenians: The Irish and America is an epic story of love, revolution, exile, and the enduring struggle for freedom.

Pages: 324, Paperback, Serenity Publications