Women's Life Writing and Early Modern Ireland ed. by Julie A. Eckerle and Naomi McAreavey (review)

The seventeenth century was arguably the most important period in Ireland's history, as the country endured continued English colonialist policies, civil wars, violent invasion, massive land confiscations, and a settlement that led to the rule, for the next two centuries, of a tiny Protestant elite. A further disaster awaited those who study the crucial middle decades of the century, and specifically the years of Oliver Cromwell's conquest and rule. In 1922, at the height of Ireland's civil war and struggle for independence, a massive fire erupted at the Public Records Office in Dublin, destroying thousands of administrative records from the thirteenth through the nineteenth centuries. As Ernie O'Malley famously described the scene, from within the giant black cloud that arose from the flaming building, one could witness "leaves of white paper" which "looked like hovering white birds" (114). While no historical period emerged unscathed, the loss was particularly damaging for seventeenth-century specialists, and especially so when it came to accessing the lives of those whose presence passed through those now-vanished records.

Yet amid the charred wreckage, some sources, to quote Julie Eckerle, have been "hiding in plain sight," neglected by scholars who have focused instead on traditional governmental records or documents authored primarily by men (204). Historians, literary critics, and scholars of life writing therefore have much to celebrate with the groundbreaking publication of Women's Life Writing and Early Modern Ireland, a collection of nine essays that opens up previously neglected sources and provides fascinating readings of women's experience of and in Ireland during its most tumultuous decades. Arguing for a "more nuanced understanding of women's identity in early modern Ireland" and their representation of "Irishness" (9), the book provides a major contribution to our historical understanding of changing modes of life writing, just as it reveals the more personal side of a world whose past was otherwise lost to us, quite literally, in the flames.

Life writing in this period, it should be pointed out, reflected different subjectivities, even if scholars have argued that "modern" interiority and psychology emerged in the works, for example, of Montaigne or Shakespeare. Early modern soldiers' accounts of their own experiences in war, for example, resist our expectations of what it was like to endure the trauma of the battlefield; the result is a frustrating opacity, as these texts resist the kind of emotionally forthcoming, and very modern, memoirs from World War I or Vietnam. As Anne Fogarty puts it in her essay, for pre-modern women, life writing is similar in that it was bound not only to rhetorical conventions but to female standards of honor, deportment, and the need to "uphold communal and religious values . . . as prized indicators of worth" (54), all of which were expected of women who held a relatively elevated status in English and Irish (or English-Irish) society. In other words, women's life writings can be more self-concealing than self-revealing, unless they are read sensitively and against the grain, as Marie-Louise Coolahan has demonstrated in her own pioneering work, and as the essays in this volume describe.

As Julie Eckerle and Naomi McAreavey point out in their introduction, the women under examination are distinct in that they straddled the British archipelagic world, belonging to neither Ireland nor England but to an in-between space where attitudes towards Ireland could be complex and ambivalent. While no essay examines women of the Irish-speaking Gaelic order, the women under consideration fall under—and cross—a multitude of categories that defined early modern Ireland's social world: the "Old English," or those descended from the Norman invasions of the twelfth century and who remained primarily Catholic; those of the "New English," or more recent Protestant transplants in the Tudor and early Stuart periods; and those who came in and settled with Oliver Cromwell's violent invasion of...