O'Grady: History of Ireland

O'Grady, History of Ireland

Title page of volume 1 of Standish O'Grady's History of Ireland, 1878.

O'Grady, History of Ireland

O'Grady, History of Ireland

Title page of volume 1 of Standish O'Grady's History of Ireland, 1878.

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History of Ireland is a work that highlights legends and tales of ancient Ireland. It became an important book in the growing Irish culture of the state. It inspired William Butler Yeats and other poets of the Irish, or Celtic, renaissance of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Standish O’Grady’s (1846–1928) role has prompted him to be referred to as the “ideological father” of the movement.

O’Grady was an Irish historian whose other work, Early Bardic Literature (1879), also directed attention to Ireland's heroic past.

A Cork man, O’Grady, graduated from Trinity College Dublin in 1868 and became a lawyer but he soon turned to writing. Up until 1898, he worked as a journalist for the Daily Express in Dublin, and later moved to Kilkenny to become editor of the Kilkenny Moderator. From 1900 to 1906 he edited the All-Ireland Review, an influential literary weekly.

His other books include: The Bog of Stars (1893); The Flight of the Eagle (1897); In the Gates of the North (1901); The Passing of Cuculain (1917).