The price of my soul / [by Bernadette Devlin]

There is no table of contents.

She tells the story of personal ‘bottom-level’ poverty, of her combined struggle to go to university and to look after her orphaned brothers and sisters ... of how she became involved in Civil Rights, and what happened when her people chose her as their MP. She tells the story of the rage behind the Ulster riots -- ‘You come to a factory, looking for a job, and they ask you which school you went to. If its name was "Saint Somebody", they know you are a Catholic and you don’t get taken on ...’. In vivid detail, she brings to life the situation which has focused world attention on Northern Ireland ... the early marches, and then the shootings, the burnings, the barricades ... how she went to America to help her people rebuild their homes ... and how she feels today. " -- from the text.

"THE PRICE OF MY SOUL is not a work of art, an autobiography, or a political manifesto. Readers who expect one or other of these things will no doubt class it as a failure. Let them. I’m not basically concerned with its success, financial or literary. I have written this book in an attempt to explain how the complexity of economic, social, and political problems of Northern Ireland threw up the phenomenon of Bernadette Devlin. I also want to tell the story of the protest movement which wrote Northern Ireland across the world’s headlines in 1968 and 1969. Because it is an account of my own impressions, it may not always be objectively accurate. If I have misinterpreted the civil rights movement at any point, I apologize to my friends for it. In this movement, which is still struggling to free our people from the bonds of economic slavery, I am only one among hundreds of my generation. We were born into an unjust system; we are not prepared to grow old in it. Finally, before I get submerged in all the Joans of Arc and Cassandras and the other fancy labels people stick on me, I want to put the real flesh-and-blood Bernadette Devlin on record. The title has a family significance. My mother — whose life story was much more worthy of being recorded than mine — planned to write her autobiography under this title. Since she more than anyone was responsible for my attitude to life and its misery, I have taken the title of her unwritten book. For this I apologize only to the members of my family. THE PRICE OF MY SOUL refers not to the price for which I would be prepared to sell out, but rather to the price we all must pay in life to preserve our own integrity. To gain that which is worth having, it may be necessary to lose everything else." -- from the foreword.