No Net Ensnares Me – Charlotte Brontë Abroad

Pauline Clooney is an award-winning Irish author and creative writing teacher at Kildare Writing Centre and the Irish Writers Centre. Her debut novel, Charlotte and Arthur, reimagining Charlotte Brontë’s honeymoon in Ireland in 1854, was published by Merdog Books October 2021.

Monica Kendall was born in North London in 1954 to a Polish father and a British mother. In the 1970s, after travelling overland in her gap year to Nepal via Afghanistan, she read Arabic at Oxford University. In summer 1975 she was in Lebanon when the third round of the civil war broke out but managed to return in time to play Dionyza in Shakespeare’s “Pericles”, performed in Sam Wanamaker’s tent on the South Bank, where later he built the Globe. At Oxford she also played Beatrice on a tour to the United States, and Desdemona and the Duchess of Malfi at the Oxford Playhouse.
She then moved into publishing studying a Masters degree in Medieval Studies at University College London. For her edition of Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi (2004) she interviewed the director Phyllida Lloyd. Her Welsh/Scottish Jenkins ancestors knew the Brontës in Brussels and Yorkshire, which is the subject of her latest book (2021). It sheds new light on Charlotte and Emily’s time in Brussels and corrects the many fabrications.

Doctor Michael O’Dowd graduated from the National University of Ireland, Galway in 1967. After post-graduate experience in Belfast he became a specialist in obstetrics and gynaecology, and holds a research Doctorate in Medicine, a PhD in History, and post-graduate qualifications in Anaesthesia and Paediatrics. His books, the self-penned The History of Medications for Women, and The History of Obstetrics and Gynaecology co-authored with Dr Elliot Philipp, are academic texts. Charlotte Brontë. An Irish Odyssey by Dr O’Dowd was published in 2021. The non-fiction book relates the story of Charlotte Brontë and the Reverend Arthur Bell Nicholls who married in her home town of Haworth in June 1854, and is a celebration of their wedding trip and Irish Odyssey.