Sara Day's Not Irish enough begins with the iconic scene of the burning down of the author's ancestral home, Derrylahan Park, in County Tipperary, after the failed assassination of her grandfather, Charles Head, a local unionist, in the troubled 1920s, a period that is often remembered in Ireland as if it were far more recent than a hundred years ago. The author goes on to explore the thorny issue of the legacy of the Anglo-Irish, a group that has often been reviled in popular culture, and whose legacy can reasonably be considered to be chequered, by exploring the history of her own family, whom she describes as having been ‘minor gentry’. She provides a detailed picture of the historical background to the family's arrival and role in Ireland, carefully annotated with detailed notes such that even a reader with no prior knowledge of Irish history, and in particular the troubled seventeenth century, would be left with a clear understanding of the context and circumstances. The style, blending a conventional historical take with a more narrative style, follows the vicissitudes of the family, which had a noteworthy presence in Waterford, then an important market centre, from the late seventeenth century.

Most readers will find themselves in more familiar territory from chapter 16 onwards, as the author traces the Head family's experiences through a period marked by the rapid growth of nationalism, at a time when there were growing numbers of educated, politically astute people among the Catholic majority of Ireland. While well-to-do, the family was not among the biggest landowners, and was, therefore, somewhat insulated from growing resentment. However, they remained firmly unionist in outlook and loyalist in ideals. Ultimately, the troubled years of the 1920s placed the family in a difficult situation, as political loyalties and popular interest in the redistribution of landed estates to small farmers made the environment increasingly difficult for members of the gentry, even those who were more modestly-off than some. When the family seat was burned down, they struggled to obtain reasonable compensation from the new Irish state and were finally compensated with a sum far smaller than its value.

It is gratifying to note that the author deals with the experiences of both male and female members of the Head family, as women's experiences are so often overlooked, or referenced only briefly. For example, chapter 10, entitled ‘Revolution, the Irish parliament and the 1798 Rebellion’, provides an interesting discussion of the marriages of the daughters of the family, and how these could serve to consolidate the family's power in a variety of ways, against the background of the stormy political waters that would lead to the rising of 1798 and, ultimately, to the move towards Irish independence. Chapter 15, ‘“Phoenix”: challenging fate in Tipperary’, discusses, among many other things, the marriage of Isabella Biddulph, aged just twenty, to William Henry Head, aged fifty, in terms of the greater freedom she would enjoy as a married woman, and the pragmatic reasons why women of her social class often entered relationships in the context of a society in which even wealthy women rarely had much property of their own. Also covered is the fact that infant mortality rates remained high, and that even the well-nourished wealthy classes often buried many children.

Justice is not always done to the author's impressive body of research in the tone of the writing, which can be excessively anecdotal and rather defensive at times. She draws extensively — perhaps to excessive length — on family memoirs that are often engaging, particularly when they evoke Edwardian times before the family's fortunes in Ireland faltered, and she quotes at length from judiciously selected historical material. In both cases, a careful editorial hand might have reduced the length of these extracts while allowing the author to focus more carefully on the point she is making. A tighter volume, a quarter to a third shorter than the current version, would make the story of this fascinating family more accessible, without losing any of the valuable content.

Notwithstanding these minor issues, Not Irish enough will be a treasure-trove to the researcher with an interest in the Anglo-Irish or indeed in Irish history generally, providing not just a wealth of historical material, but also the human face of both much- and less-studied periods in Irish history. The author's gaze upon her own family is refreshingly objective, notably in the epilogue, in which she discusses the fact that her own grandfather's view of Irish history was just as partial, in its own way, as the nationalist view taught in Irish schools when the Irish state was young.