The Year of the French by Thomas Flanagan

The Year of the French by Thomas Flanagan

In 1798, Irish patriots, committed to freeing their country from England, landed with a company of French troops in County Mayo, in westernmost Ireland. They were supposed to be an advance guard, followed by other French ships with the leader of the rebellion, Wolfe Tone. Briefly they triumphed, raising hopes among the impoverished local peasantry and gathering a group of supporters. But before long the insurgency collapsed in the face of a brutal English counterattack.

Very few books succeed in registering the sudden terrible impact of historical events; Thomas Flanagan's is one. Subtly conceived, masterfully paced, with a wide and memorable cast of characters, The Year of the French brings to life peasants and landlords, Protestants and Catholics, along with old and abiding questions of secular and religious commitments, empire, occupation, and rebellion. It is quite simply a great historical novel.

Named the most distinguished work of fiction in 1979 by the National Book Critics' Circle.

Thomas Flanagan (1923-2002), the grandson of Irish immigrants, grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut, where he and his friend Truman Capote controlled the school newspaper. Flanagan obtained his Ph.D. after attending Amherst College (with a two-year break to serve in the Pacific Fleet). He received his bachelor's degree from Columbia University, where he studied under Lionel Trilling and wrote stories for Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. He produced an important scholarly study, The Irish Novelists, 1800 to 1850, in 1959, and relocated to Berkeley the following year, where he taught English and Irish literature for many years at the University of California. He began working at the State University of New York at Stonybrook in 1978 and left in 1996.

Flanagan and his wife Jean visited Ireland on an yearly basis, where he became friends with a number of writers, notably Benedict Kiely and Seamus Heaney, whom he later assisted to bring to America. His deep understanding of Irish history and literature also influenced his trilogy of historical novels, which began with The Year of the French (1979, winner of the National Critics' Circle prize for fiction, reprinted by NYRB Classics in 2004) and ended with The Tenants of Time (1988) and The End of the Hunt (1994). There You Are: Essays on Irish and American Literature and History (2004) is his other book. Flanagan was a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, and The Kenyon Review, among others.

Professor of English and American Literature at University College Dublin, Seamus Deane is presently the Keough Professor of Irish Studies at Notre Dame. Collected Poems, Celtic Revivals, Weird Country: Ireland and Modernity, and the novel Reading in the Dark are among his works. He was the General Editor of the Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, which was published in three volumes.