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Eibhear Walshe and Eleanor Fitzsimons, "Speranza: Poems by Jane Wilde" (Liverpool UP, 2025)
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Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today because we get to talk about quite an interesting book titled Poems by Jane Wilde, published by Liverpool University Press in 2025. Now, this book is doing a whole bunch of things. On the one hand, it is an edited collection of poems that were written by, as you might think, Jane Wilde, who we're going to be talking all about in terms of her poetry and her life. But the book isn't just a sort of collection of poetry that you read the poems of. There's also analysis and context and history and all sorts of things to help make sense of these poems so that one can read them, appreciate them. And this was done by two editors, Dr. Ava Walsh and Eleanor Fitzsimons. And I'm very pleased to have Eleanor with me today to tell us about this whole project. Obviously some of the poems as well, but kind of putting all of this information together so that we don't just get the poems, we also get the context and the understanding of them. So we're going to Be talking about a whole bunch of issues related to Irish history, politics, women's rights, all sorts of things. Eleanor, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
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It's my absolute pleasure, Miranda. I'm delighted to be here and delighted to talk about our most recent book. Just to give you a little bit of an introduction as to who I am, as you say. I'm Eleanor Fitzsimons and I'm a research and writer mainly of biographies, and I specialize particularly in recovering women's voices. My first biography was a book called Wilde's Women, which looks at all the women in Oscar Wilde's life, including obviously, most prominently, his mother, but also his sister, his wife, and the various women that he collaborated with over the years. So that's, I suppose, where my expertise in the wild comes from. But I've also written a biography of the children's writer E. Nesbitt. And most recently before this book we're talking about today, I compiled and introduced an annotated selection of articles from the Women's World, which is a magazine that Oscar Wilde edited between the years 1887 and 1889. So they're my Wildian credentials. I'm also quite closely involved with the Oscar Wilde Society, and I'm an honorary patron and I'm on the editorial billboard of the Wildian Journal.
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B
Okay, that's a very helpful introduction, as obviously this project was done with your co editor, but he's not able to join us today, unfortunately. Would you mind giving us a brief introduction to sort of his background and what he brought to the project?
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Yes. An incredibly impressive and really lovely man, Dr. Aver Walsh, who was my co editor, who is a very impressive scholar and very involved in the whole Wildgian circle as well, but also a novelist, a very accomplished novelist, which I think think brings a real richness to his writing and a lovely empathy and imagination as well as all of his own writing. He was also director of Creative Writing in University College, Cork. And he. I was very aware of him because he had written so extensively himself about the Wilde family and their circle and in particular, in fact, the Wilde parents, Oscar Wilde's parents. But we knew each other only slightly until we met probably about six years ago or so on the steering committee to erect a plaque in honor of Jane Wilde on the front of 1 Merrion Square in Dublin, which is the family home, the Wilde family home. And at that point we started our discussions about writing something about her and her work in particular, because we both believe and still believe to this day, in fact, that her scholarly reputation suffered very badly as a result of what happened to her son. Because he fell from grace and his reputation suffered.
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B
She.
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She fell out of favor with him. And her reputation, unlike his, was never really recovered or redeemed. So she was, in her day, such a celebrated poet and such an important poet, and she provides a really important link between Irish revolutionary poetry and the wider European romantic, revolutionary poetic movement. Something that had never really been explored. And we were very determined to put that right. So it was Ava, in fact, who had written and worked with Liverpool University Press previously, and he approached them and they commissioned this book, which we're very grateful for.
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B
Always interesting to hear about how a project comes together. And this book certainly does quite a lot to sort of put her back on the map. So let's talk a little bit then about, well, the woman who became Jane Wilde. But obviously she didn't start off as Oscar Wilde's mum. She had a whole life before that. So I wonder if we can talk a bit about her sort of early life and background, because one of the descriptors you have in the book is that she was a most unlikely insurrectionist, which is very captivating as a phrase. So can you tell her about. Tell us about her early life and background?
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Absolutely, yes. And in fact, you're quite right to point out that she wasn't always Oscar's mother, because the bulk of her poetry and her most important poems really were written long before she was married, long before she became a mother, when she was Jane Elgey, which was her family name now, she had a very difficult life and she really was quite a fascinating and contradictory woman throughout her entire life. But her beginnings were very difficult. So she was born into a turbulent marriage where effectively her parents had separated by the time she was a toddler, really. Her father left Ireland and he went to India under slightly mysterious circumstances. And when Jane Elge was about two years old, he died over there, leaving the family really in quite difficult circumstances, in quite a bit of poverty and having a very peripatetic and dislocating kind of a. Where they moved largely between Dublin, where her mother's family were from, and Wexford, where there were other family connections on her father's side. They would have had real struggles with money. They would have rented their accommodation and it would have been really quite difficult for them all. Not a very well documented period of her life. But what we do know about her is that she was very well connected on her mother's side to an influential and prominent Dublin family called the Kingsburys. And what makes her an unlikely revolutionary, I suppose, is their politics, because they would have been staunch Unionists very, very keen on upholding the act of Union between Ireland and England at the time, which made Ireland completely a satellite state of the uk, ruled from the Westminster Parliament with no say in its own affairs. Her family would have been very supportive of that, and she was absolutely implacably opposed to that. So that's, I suppose, where that idea of her being a most unlikely insurrectionist comes from. Now, her introduction to the whole nationalism, the nationalist movement in Ireland really began quite early. She was just 25 years of age when, by her own account, and by the account of her son Oscar later in life, and also by the account of W.B. yeats, she encountered a very prominent funeral in Dublin. And that was the funeral of a young man called Tom Stavers. And he was one of the founder members of the Young Ireland movement and one of the founders of the newspaper that she subsequently wrote most of her poetry for. And that was the Nation newspaper. And he died aged just 41, of scarlet fever. And he was seen as such absolutely influential, important, charismatic and revolutionary figure in Irish society that his funeral was absolutely enormous, by Jane's account. She says that when she saw this enormous outpouring of grief and love for a poet, she thought, well, if that's how poetry are regarded, I want to be a poet as well. Which is typical of her, kind of flippant, but also, I think, a grain of truth there, because she did love to be prominent and she loved to be celebrated. If we look at how she then, I suppose, became involved with the Nation newspaper, which was the main outlet for her poetry. And most of the poetry in our book, in fact, was published first in the Nation. She actually wrote a letter, she responded to an advertisement in the paper looking for new writers, and she sent in a poem that she had translated, a poem called the Holy War. She translated it from German, and she was a very accomplished linguist. That's one of her key characteristics. And she accompanied this poem with a letter which she signed John Fanshawe Ellis, using her own initials, but purporting to be a man. And the poem was published, and within a few weeks, having failed to entice her into the office, her editor, a man named Charles Gavin Duffy, another very prominent Irish nationalist, called to visit her at her home and was absolutely shocked and startled and amazed to be greeted by this very tall, very beautiful young woman called Jane Elgey. So that was her beginnings as a nationalist poet.
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B
Yeah, that's a really interesting backstory, kind of a combination of things there that, as one goes through the book, sees those threads continue. And obviously her wanting to be involved in these politics and wanting to be involved in terms of poetry and is a key element to making that happen, but wanting it alone is not necessarily enough. So what were the other kind of key factors for her becoming such an important figure in the Young Ireland movement?
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Sure, yes, that's very interesting question, because, as you say, I mean, she was translating a lot of early poems and she was just sending in translations, and she could have had one poem published or no more, but she had this great ability, I think, to empathize with the Irish difficulties and plight of the time. So when she started writing, I suppose maybe by coincidence, or maybe it was what galvanized her. We were at the height of the famine, the great famine in Ireland, where, as people probably know, the potato crop had failed. But the terrible starvation that occurred as a result was largely to do with political issues and with the way food was exported from Ireland and not made available for Irish people. So there was an enormous amount of terrible death and suffering in the country that even though she lived in Dublin, which wasn't hugely affected by this, she was well informed enough to very, very graphically and vividly document the famine in her poetry, but also raised this kind of rallying cry, particularly to the young men of Ireland, to say, this cannot be tolerated. You must rise up against this, and you must rise up with arms and fight against us and overthrow our oppressor and take control of our country. And whatever way she wrote her poems and how she expressed herself just had this galvanizing effect on the readership of the Nation newspaper, the organ of the Young Ireland movement, and became really an important source of information and way of, I suppose, building people's and boosting people's spirits and allowing them to think of revolution. So she came along at a very important time, and she had this great ability to express the frustration and the sadness and the anger of the people of the country.
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B
Okay, so timing really is key here, and that's so often the case for these sorts of things. But of course, the trap we don't want to fall into is because at that particular moment, she was sort of expressing the frustration so clearly. That was her one moment, because she's not a one moment poet or figure. So can you give us a sense of scale here? I mean, how many poems are we talking about being published? Is it all in the one publication? Give us a sense of the Range. If we've now kind of got a starting point, that's not the stopping point, is it?
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No, it's absolutely not the stopping point. You're quite right. Although she did have periods of her life where she wouldn't have been very active, certainly publicly, with her poetry. She wouldn't have been published so much, but she was writing privately. So those years of famine poetry and of revolutionary poetry really were the late 1840s. She gets married then in 1851. But by then she's really quite disillusioned because there has been this great uprising that she called for and that she helped to bring about, really. And it has been a terrible failure, as many Irish uprisings were. And it really fizzles out into nothing. And she becomes very disillusioned. She never lost her interest in the men of that period, in her comrades. And she continued to invite them to her house for dinner and to even deal with them when they had been arrested and they'd been deported in some cases. But she stops writing her revolutionary poetry in the 1850s. And she turns her attention then, as time goes on more, to essay writing for a time. Some really interesting essays on literary figures, on feminism, kind of a proto feminism, that she would have believed in a very wide range of topics. But she returns to poetry time and time again. And over her lifetime, really, she would have had dozens and dozens, if not hundreds of poems published across many different publications, but. But the Nation in particular, but others as well. So, for instance, she was published in Duffy's Hibernian Magazine, another Irish magazine, the National Review, which would be sort of our equivalent of the Spectator or the Saturday Review, but also in quite a number of English publications. The St. James's Gazette, the Pall Mall Gazette, the Lady. And then in America, in particular, in the Pilot newspaper, which is a Pilot, a newspaper based out of Boston, a Catholic newspaper based out of Boston. So quite wide ranging. When she's a married woman then with children, she collects all her poems together and she publishes them in a collected volume, and that's repeated then a second edition in 1871. And she adds in a couple of her newer poems there. So she was very prolific and she wrote across decades, really.
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B
That's very helpful to understand the range and especially the different types of things. And we've already mentioned translation as well as her own poetry. There's really a lot going on here, which to me raised the immediate question of how did you figure out how to deal with all of that scale in a book? You know, this is not thank goodness, 800 pages long. So how did you choose which poems to include in the book?
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A
We tried to be as inclusive as possible, so we took as our basis her own collected edition of poems, although we changed the order, so she hadn't put them in chronological order. And in fact, one the of of the contemporaneous reviewers suggested that they would be best read in chronological order. And so we reorganized all of those poems, but we went beyond that then and we looked for later poems that she had written, and there were quite a number of them right up into the 1870s and 1880s, where the themes and the tone changed quite a bit. So she writes poems such as Historic Women, a very, very long, blank verse poem, which was first published in the Women's Suffrage Gazette, where she celebrates the achievements of women right down through the ages. And that shows her great depth of knowledge of the classics of history. She ironically, in some ways spends quite a bit of time in that poem celebrating Queen Victoria, who would presumably have at one time been her great enemy, this great symbol of empire. But she's kind of moved on at that stage. But I think it is worth spending a little bit of time looking at her translations because half of her poems, approximately half of her poems were translated from other European languages. Now, she herself, and she writes about this in a quite interesting way in an essay that she wrote about Victor Hugo, she took a fairly loose faire approach to translation. What she really tried to do was to capture the spirit and the sense of a poem, and she would then put it into English, but keeping some faith with the original, but very much putting her own stamp on it, and then very often adapting it to suit an Irish. But I think that makes her really important because what she was doing was that she was linking Ireland into this much wider European romantic poetic movement of the mid 19th century, something that was done by very few other Irish poets. She's almost unique in that, and it really puts Ireland in the map. I think poetically that she's tapping into this and translating works from people like Pushkin and Goethe and Schiller and Victor Hugo, as I've mentioned, Lemartine, she was a very accomplished linguist and she could read their poems in the original. And it's really interesting, I think, that she was influenced so heavily by these poets and took their ideas and adapted them to an Irish situation. So that sets her aside from a lot of her contemporaries as well.
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Prices and participation may vary. Yeah, I'm glad you've mentioned that and explained it, in fact, because that really was quite notable. Reading through the book, just how many translations and how diverse they were. It wasn't like she picked sort of one German poet and then did all of his poems. Right. It was much more choiceful than that and therefore really interesting.
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A
Absolutely, yes. And even the languages that she chooses. So her strong skills would have been in German and French and she also, she translated books in German and French and Latin, but she also translates Spanish poetry, Portuguese poetry, some of the Scandinavian languages she engages with as well. So very wide ranging. And it gives that really pan European view, I think, of poetry at the time and the ideas that were prevalent and gives us the opportunity to read those ideas in English. I mean, she's giving us that opportunity, which is very much to be welcomed.
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B
Yeah, no, it's brilliant. Were there any other key aspects of her poetry that you especially noticed in putting all this together?
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A
Yes, I think she's quite an interesting woman in that sense too, because she was a very public poet. Several of her poems, in fact, were adapted. They were set to music, they were sung as street ballads. And she loved that aspect of her poetry of being very, very public and being, I suppose, what she would have seen as the V of the nation. In fact, she even writes at one time in one of her poems about the role of a poet. And she says, you know, that the role of the poet, I'm paraphrasing her now, is not to take up arms, but it is to be the voice and to sort of galvanize other people. But she also could write very privately some of her later poems, particularly around the time when her husband died and she was in a very loving, very happy marriage to a very accomplished Irish man. And she writes these. These very private poems then during his final illness and just after his death. They're published, but they're much, much quieter, very despairing in many ways. Poems where she seems to have lost her faith. In many ways, she speaks directly to death. She doesn't get a satisfactory answer. She wonders what comes next after life ends. They're quite dark, they're quite disturbing in many ways, but they're extremely private. They show the. The soul, I think, of a quite turbulent woman who can be quite confused and overawed and fearful of the future, rather than this great warrior poet that she is often portrayed as.
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B
Those are definitely some really interesting aspects. Thank you for highlighting your experience of going through this. What did her contemporaries think at the time? What did they like about her work? After the moment of the Famine, obviously, she was popular enough that she kept getting published. So what were the sorts of things that people at the time were sort of noting and lauding about her work?
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A
She shifts her, I suppose, her focus quite a bit as time goes by. And as I say, she was publishing quite a bit less than she had been in her youth. But she starts to write, I suppose, celebrations of other famous people's lives, in a sense. So she writes this really quite wonderful poem called Ave Caesar, which is her tribute to Longfellow, and that celebrates his work and his life. It was published in the Boston Pilot originally, but it was reproduced over and over again and also across time. So anytime there was any sort of celebration, she wrote it when he was alive, it was published when he was 70, it was published after he died. It kept being repeated and included in anthologies because I think it was. Was seen as a very key poem to celebrate this man who she regarded very much as a contemporary, you know, as a fellow poet, as somebody who had very much a similar standing to herself. And it is actually a very impressive poem, and it is a lovely celebration of all his work, which she was very familiar with. So she writes poems like that. And she also wrote a series of poems celebrating, well, celebrating in the end, the life of a very famous Irish man, Daniel o'. Connell. She had started off in youth writing poems, criticizing him because she felt that he had sort of lost his fire, lost his way, wasn't leading the great movement that she was involved in as well as he used to. But as she grows older, she mellows and she writes some lovely odes celebrating the great importance of the work of Daniel o', Connell, the great Irish liberator. So those more reflective poems that she writes later, celebrating very famous figures, I think, are more characteristic of her later work. More mature, more thoughtful. Thoughtful, perhaps. And I think that's what was appealing to people at that stage. And by then she was being published in different places. So less in the Nation, more in American newspapers. And Irish newspapers were picking up and repeating her poems. More mainstream, I suppose, is how we describe it, our sort of modern parlance.
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B
Yeah, that's a good way of framing it. We've mentioned now a few times the kind of poems being published once and then include an anthology and published again. And sort of. Some of them come back in a number of senses and others, of course, don't. Is there anything further we should understand about kind of which ones have these continued lives?
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A
Yes, it's quite interesting because I had a look at this to see which of her poems were most anthologized. And it's interesting to note that a lot of these anthologies would have been coming out of England. So there were English books that were called things like An Anthology of Irish Poetry or Irish Fireside Poetry or whatever it happened to be. But the ones that appear most often are those very revolutionary early poems that she wrote where she's kind of railing against Empire. So just to give you a small list of the most anthologized poems. Man's Mission, the Year of Revolutions, the Voice of the Poor, the Exodus, a slightly later one, then called the Prisoners. And you're getting a sense that these are all her political poems. So Man's Mission, for instance, which is one of her most famous poems, was written in 1847, at the height of the Famine. And the Year of Revolutions, was written just six months later, in 1848. The voice of the poor is also 1848. So all of those poems were originally published in the Nation. And they all appeared in or around six months or so preceding this terrible failed uprising of 1848. So she was at her most angry. She was at her most soul stirring and galvanizing. And they're absolutely filled with idealism, with this righteousness, where she suggests that we have the backing of God. And she implores her countrymen, really, to take up arms and to. I think this is key as well, to follow the example of other nations, to tap into this wider movement. And she speaks, to quote from one of her poems of the rhythmical March of the gathering nations, of the crashing of thrones Meet their fierce exaltations the cry of humanity. So it's this idea of this great, great global movement, this people, this underclass, who are all rising up against oppression. And I suppose that is a universal theme. Even though she was writing about a very particular time, it is very much a universal and timeless theme. A couple of the later poems that are anthologized quite heavily. So the exodus that appeared, actually after a very long interlude where she wasn't writing much poetry. And she writes it at a quite interesting time. She writes it in response to the census of 1861. Now, her husband, Sir William Wilde as he became, and Dr. William Wilde as he was, because he was a medical doctor of great scale and greatly acclaimed. He had a key role in the Irish census, in the taking of the census, because he was the medical commissioner. So he saw at firsthand what the famine had done to the Irish population, because he takes the census beforehand in 1841, and then he comes back again later, and he's involved in the census of 1851, and he sees the death and the illness. He goes into people's homes. He interviews them. He knows firsthand what has happened in the country. And he comes back and he tells his wife, and they're both very upset by this. And then in 1861, when the census appears again, again, you can see the terrible effect that this has had on the population. The population is almost halved. So Jane writes this poem in response to the census in 1861. And she says that it has rung a cry from her heart. It's a very bitter poem. And she talks really strong language where she talks about a million a decade, a million corpses lying in fever sheds, corpses huddled on foundering decks, where she's talking about the great exodus out of the country, the great migration. She speaks of the shroudless dead lying at the side of the road and a nation dying of inner decay. So it's a very sad poem, but it's also just an incredibly powerful poem filled with. With great imagery. And I think the timing is fascinating because it's almost like this appearance of this information has brought her right back to the 1840s and to the terrible destruction that was wrought on the country. So there are the poems that are most anthologized, and they are her angry early poems and the poems that deal with those topics.
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B
Yeah, that's really interesting. And I was so pleased in the book to see that you had done that kind of analysis, because it does really kind of raise the sorts of questions of like, oh, why does this kind of keep coming back? What keeps it resonant? And obviously that anger of the politics is a key feature of it, I think. Is there anything further we want to discuss about the evolution of her thinking on Irish independence?
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A
She becomes a little bit disillusioned over time. So where she had been very optimistic, I suppose, at one point, that there will be this great uprising and this great movement when there's a new movement that comes to. To fruition later on. Because there's always different movements coming through in Ireland at the time. By then, her life has changed very dramatically. She's left Ireland now. She's an interesting woman because having been born into poverty, she attained great wealth when she was married because her husband was a very, very successful man. But she loses everything again after his death because it turns out that he has been absolutely disastrous with the management of his finances. And he's left him very heavily in debt. So she has to sell her lovely home in Dublin, a very prominent. And she has to move to London with absolutely nothing and reinvent herself all over again. And by this stage, she's in her 50s. So she goes to London. She rents really very modest rooms in a house in Chelsea, which at the time wasn't actually the great desirable address that it is now. And she lives for a time with her other son, her older son Willie. And she has to start earning a living. So by then she starts writing for really quite prominent English magazines. And again, as I say, she's writing about topics that are away from her revolutionary past. And she's quite funny in that she applies for a pension from the British government, which she receives on account of her husband's great prominence. And she finds this quite funny that this great revolutionary poet is getting this pension from the government that she sought to overthrow. So she sort of modifies, I suppose, her approach. And she's quite critical of the new movement, which she describes as the Fenian movement. And she says, I'm not a Fenian, and they want a republic. And that's the last thing Ireland should have, is a republic. What a terrible idea. So she does change, but I suppose her life has changed. And she does feel this kind of debt of gratitude to London, a city that she grows to love, a city that she sees as having given her a chance at reinvention, a chance at a livelihood and a chance at prominence again. She's running her literary salons again. And she has achieved great prominence in English society. I Suppose it's no wonder really that her attitudes change.
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B
Yeah, I suppose that does make sense. Is there any particular poem or maybe a few poems that we haven't mentioned yet that you really want to include in our discussion?
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A
I think that it's nice to look at her poem Historic Women in a little bit more detail because it's a completely different aspect of her life, I suppose. She was also a very staunch feminist and a very strong defender of rights for women. So she herself as a young woman had received no formal education and she was largely self taught, incredibly well informed woman, and she read and studied all the time through her own volition. But she felt very angry about that, so she campaigned. One of her great campaigns throughout her life was for access to education and the professions for women. So she writes this poem where she starts it off really by talking about these strong, splendid souls, these women, forgotten women, strong, splendid souls that chafe at human wrong. And the human wrong really is that they have been underestimated and that their true importance isn't given enough credit. And she speaks of poets in that poem as well. So she mentions Sappho in particular and says that how important these women really were to shaping movements and shaping societies. And this poem demonstrates just such a deep knowledge of history and a deep knowledge of the classics. And it was published to little acclaim really in the Suffrage Journal initially, but it gets reprinted. And where it's reprinted is in the Woman's World, her son's magazine, the magazine that he's editing. And it's beautifully illustrated. There's an absolutely lovely illustration that accompanies the poem. So again, she rises to a little bit of prominence there because that magazine was very popular at the time and very talked about and her poem appears there. But she's quite funny about that actually, because just beforehand an anthology of poetry had appeared and Oscar Wilde had written about it in quite an amount of detail in his magazine and had mentioned several of the Irish poets that were included and had even reproduced some of the poems from the anthology, in fact, from new women poets, one of whom was E. Nesbit. But he neglected to publish anything from his mother and she was absolutely outraged. And she writes him this very funny letter, which we reproduce in the book, in fact, where she goes, Dear Mr. Editor, I mean, what are you doing here? You haven't included any of my poems. So in some sense his inclusion of that great poem, Historic Women is an apology to her for neglecting her, for not including her poems. From this new analogy that's been produced, I think it shows that they had this very playful relationship. They were very close. Close, but she was very quick also to pick him up on the fact that she was a poet, too. He started out as a poet, and she was a poet first, and she was a bigger celebrity than him. So it's quite an interesting anecdote as well from his tour of America, which he undertakes as a young man in his 20s in 1882, where he turns up in two cities in America, one in Minnesota and in San Francisco. And he is introduced in both places as the son, son of Speranza, as the son of this great Irish woman and this great celebrated daughter of Ireland. And on one of those occasions, in fact, in San Francisco, he gives a speech about Irish poetry and he reads her poems to a very appreciative audience of mostly Irish Americans. There he reads two of her poems and he talks about her, his great respect for her as a writer, as a literary father.
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B
Yes, that is, I think, a very good anecdote to explain kind of a number of threads that help us understand kind of why this project is. Make sense to do.
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A
Right.
- [35:02]
B
She wasn't. She might not be as well known now, but she really was then.
- [35:07]
A
She is very much so, yes. And I think her transatlantic fame is important to remember because it wasn't just in Ireland that she was celebrated. She was very much celebrated and well known in American cities, largely because a lot of her contemporaries, a lot of the readers of the nation, a of lot, lot of the people that she had worked with in the Young Ireland movement had actually emigrated to America by then and were spreading the word, I suppose, in the great American cities, as.
- [35:35]
B
You are, helping spread the word about her now, many, many years later, obviously, but to try and revive some of this understanding. So thank you for telling us about Speranza and all the, you know, obviously a highlights tour version of the book, given how much detail is packed into it, but I think that gives us a good sense of the project. If I can ask, therefore, as a final question, what you might be working on now that this book is out in the world.
- [36:00]
A
Yes, good question. The book has a slightly interesting history in the fact that it came out the very beginning of this year and then we had a launch and a symposium around it just a couple of weeks ago, in fact. So it still feels very much alive to me. But I had a very busy couple of years, the last couple of years working on two books on this one and also on the. The book about the woman's world. So I'm in theory, taking a little bit of time off, but there are still quite a few projects I'm still working on, the Wildian. And a new project that I have that's just coming to fruition now, in fact, is that I'm co editing a special edition of the Brazilian Journal of Irish Studies. I've been asked to do that and it's a special commemorative edition called Oscar Wilde 125 years on, because it's 125 years since his death. And that's going to be very interesting because again, I think I'm slightly tapping into what Speranza was doing in that we're trying to open up Wild and what he had to say to the wider world. And it's been absolutely fascinating to see the impact his writing and his work had on South American countries and on Brazil in particular, where he was really well known and celebrated in his lifetime and beyond.
- [37:11]
B
Well, that certainly sounds like an interesting project. Best of luck.
- [37:14]
A
Look, thank you very much.
- [37:16]
B
While you are investigating that, of course listeners can read the book we've been discussing titled Poems by Jane Wilde, published by Liverpool University Press in 2025. Eleanor, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [37:28]
A
It was my absolute pleasure. Miranda, thank you very much for asking.