Book launch: A Clarewoman’s Journey by Anne Loughnane

When Edinburgh-based author Anne Loughnane was a young social worker in West Clare during the early 1970s, she found an elderly woman and her grown-up son inhabiting a semi-derelict cottage. During their short acquaintance, she learned of the woman’s astonishing life, which led from late 19th century West Clare, where memories of the Famine and terror of the workhouse were still all too present, across the Atlantic to years of service among the prosperous of New York, and back to marriage with a respected Clare farmer in a dramatically transformed Ireland. Then came widowhood and a descent into poverty, still haunted by a debilitating “Famine mentality”.

The result is A Clarewoman’s Journey, part authorial memoir, part fictional reconstruction, which vividly evokes Eilin’s contrasting lives on both sides of the Atlantic, in a moving and illuminating account of a life that encompassed enormous personal, cultural and historical change.

Anne, whose previous book, In Pursuit of Kate Corbett, charted her great-grandmother’s extraordinary migration from Dublin to a ranch in Wyoming, will launch A Clarewoman’s Journey in De Valera Public Library, Ennis, on Tuesday 6th September at 7.00pm. All welcome.