Sarah Butler’s Irish Tales, a Jacobite Romance

Sarah Butler’s Irish Tales, published in 1716, is a romance set against the historical background of Brian Boru’s victory against the Vikings in 1014. Given the timing of its publication, a year after the Jacobite rebellion of 1715, the work has been read as an allegorical expression of pro-Jacobite sympathy. Yet the tragic romance dominates the work, complicating this interpretation. This article argues that the combination of fictionalized history and romance found in Irish Tales shows the work to be part of a tradition of romance writing by women in support of the royalist or Jacobite cause. Moreover, this article considers how the heroic role played by the female protagonist in these works represents an aesthetic and political response to the failure to restore James ii and his issue to the throne.