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in County Mayo in the summer of 1798, she wrote to her cousin a letter which conWrmed both her reliance on and her commitment to the activity of writing: How long this may last we cannot tell. I am going on in the old way, writing stories. I cannot be a captain of dragoons, and sitting with my hands before me would not make any of us one degree safer.25 In this letter Edgeworth explicitly refers to the social restrictions of a gendered world. She feels her role in this signiWcant moment of Irish history to be a very limited one. Yet, it was precisely her experience of the quagmire of gender relations—as a woman writer and as a disenfranchised member of her own class—that qualiWed her to produce the Wrst realistic treatment of the Irish in English Wction. —Appalachian State University NOTES AND GLOSSES ON CASTLE RACKRENT, 1800 90 25 The Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth , ed. Augustus Hare (London: Edward Arnold, 1894), p. 53. COVER Fittingly, the covers for this thirtieth volume of Éire-Ireland will offer for the reader’s gaze four visually and historically intriguing illustrations from Treasures from the National Library of Ireland (1994). Sponsored by the late Malachy McCloskey of the Boyne Valley Honey Company, distributed in North America by Syracuse University Press, and edited by Noel Kissane, Treasures from the National Library of Ireland offers a wealth of plates illustrating the library’s rich holdings and, perforce, a portable guide to the library’s collections. Each category of the library ’s holdings—from books to photographs to genealogical records—receives the commentary of a short essay and of the detailed notes on each illustration. From the “Gaelic Manuscripts” section we have chosen an illuminated address presented to Douglas Hyde on November 26, 1905, by a New York branch of Conradh na Gaeilge. Executed on vellum by Éoin S. Ua Liaigh, the address was presented to Dr. Hyde during a ceremony at Carnegie Hall marking the start of his 1905–1906 fund-raising tour in the United States. Hyde recalled the event in his memoir Mo Thuras go hAmerice (1937). The National Library houses a similarly iconic illuminated address presented by the Land League to Charles Stewart Parnell on his return from United States twenty- ve years before. We thank the staff of the National Library and particularly Dr. Patricia Donlon, its director, for kind permission to reproduce these plates. ...