Women's Life Writing and Early Modern Ireland

Julie A. Eckerle, Naomi McAreavey

• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9780803299979
• eBook ISBN:
  9781496214263
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

Women's Life Writing and Early Modern Ireland provides anoriginalperspective on both new and familiar texts in this first critical collection to focuson seventeenth-century women's life writing in a specificallyIrish context.By shifting the focus away from England—even though many of these writers would have identified themselves as English—and making Ireland and Irishness the focus of theiressays, the contributors resituate women's narratives in a powerful and revealing landscape. This volume addresses a range of genres, from letters to book marginalia, and a number of different women, from now-canonical life writers such as Mary Rich and Ann Fanshawe to far less familiar figures such as Eliza Blennerhassett and the correspondents and supplicants of William King, archbishop of Dublin.The writings of the Boyle sisters and the Duchess of Ormonde—women from the two most important families in seventeenth-century Ireland—also receive a thorough analysis. These innovative and nuanced scholarly considerations of the powerful influence of Ireland on these writers' construction of self, provide fresh, illuminating insights into both their writing and their broader cultural context.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Alice Thornton, Elizabeth Freke, and the Remembrances of Ireland
• 2. Reading Dislocation and Emotion in the Writings of Alice Thornton, Ann Fanshawe, and Barbara Blaugdone
• 3. The Boyle Women and Familial Life Writing
• 4. Life Writing in the Boyle Family Network
• 5. The Politics of Honor in Lady Ranelagh’s Ireland
• 6. The Place of Ireland in the Letters of the First Duchess of Ormonde
• 7. English-Irish Social Networks in the Seventeenth Century
• 8. Women’s Letters in the Lyons Collection of the Correspondence of William King
• 9. Ownership Inscriptions and Life Writing in the Books of Early Modern Women
• Appendix
• Bibliography
• Contributors
• Index
• About Julie A. Eckerle
• About Naomi McAreavey
• Series List