Guinness, Michele. The Guinness Legend: The Changing Fortunes of a Great Family.

London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1989. First edition. 8vo. Original black cloth, spine lettered in gilt, in the original illustrated dust jacket featuring a portrait of Arthur Guinness. Illustrated with photographic plates and genealogical tables. pp. xvi, 329. Index and family trees. Very good in very good dust jacket.

An engaging history of the Guinness dynasty by Michele Guinness, tracing the remarkable rise of one of Ireland’s most influential families from the foundation of the brewery by Arthur Guinness in eighteenth-century Dublin to the complex fortunes of the modern family. The work examines not only the brewing empire but also the remarkable range of personalities within the family—bankers, missionaries, aristocrats, and politicians.

Particular attention is given to figures such as Henry Grattan Guinness, the evangelical missionary whose international religious work took the family name far beyond Ireland, as well as to the later aristocratic branches including the Earls of Iveagh and the banking Rundell line. The book also touches upon twentieth-century controversies surrounding members of the family and explores the notion of a supposed “Guinness curse.”

A well-researched and readable account of a family that shaped Irish industrial, social, and philanthropic life for over two centuries.

[WR Food & Drink]