The Great Hunger is the classic history book that inspired me to write about the Irish Famine.
Cecil Woodham-Smith, née Fitzgerald, spent years researching the causes of the famine and how the people of Ireland suffered during the famine years. She published this in 1962.
My copy is a bit battered and by now I almost know it by heart.
The first sentence reads,
‘At the beginning of the year 1845, the state of Ireland was, as it had been for nearly seven hundred years, a source of grave anxiety to England.’
The book goes on to recount the struggles between Britain and Ireland that would result in one million deaths with another million fleeing for their lives to North America and England.
