If the dominant image of the writers’ culture of Dublin has been shaped by the male-dominated literary pubs of the mid-twentieth century, this image eclipses another side of Dublin literary life at the time. Situated in the heart of Baggotonia, off the Grand Canal, was the childhood home of Elizabeth Bowen. This chapter starts with Bowen’s memories of the area in the early 1900s, then takes her book on the Shelbourne Hotel as a base from which to explore other writers who lived in the area, including Lady Morgan in the nineteenth century, George Moore in the early twentieth century, and others such as Mary Lavin, who lived nearby and frequently wrote in the National Library. The chapter also looks that the adjacent St. Stephen’s Green, which produced its own eighteenth-century literary culture, and later features in one of the key moments in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. What emerges from a consideration of the writers who, over the centuries, have lived and written near one of the city’s main parks, is a sense of the many ways in which a writer can be a public figure.

This chapter considers a range of methods for writing about literary soundscapes. R. Murray Schafer’s seminal coinage of soundscape residually informs current debates about the sonic dimensions of literary form, but the discursive alignment of print and voice and reading and listening is an enduring aspect of the history of modern literature. This history extends from the capacious descriptive ambition of the realist novel through to, and beyond, literary modernism’s experimental ambition to capture the sounds of modern life at a critical moment when an array of recording devices emerged to do what literature could not – record sound in real time. Spanning from Charles Dickens to Elizabeth Bowen, this chapter analyses the various ways writers from the nineteenth century to the present have responded to the sound worlds in which they lived by attending to the distinctive sonic textures of literary language and its unique capacity to channel the rhythms and voices of everyday socially embodied sound.