Eleanor Fitzsimons

Wild yet chaste, impudent and ageless, Sarah Bernhardt was inescapably Oscar Wilde’s Salomé, ‘the most splendid creation’.

In 1812 the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and his wife, Harriet, travelled to Dublin to assist the Irish cause and promote revolution. Eleanor Fitzsimons explains how the harsh realities of the experience swiftly shattered their juvenile idealism.