In the introduction to this important book, Rachel Wilson locates the evolution of an agenda for Irish women's history in the context of a considerably more expansive historiography of early modern women's lives in England, Scotland, and Wales. Acknowledging the pioneering program of Mary O'Dowd and Margaret MacCurtain, first initiated over twenty years ago, while concurrently highlighting discrete case studies of women's historical experience by scholars such as Sean Connolly and Toby Barnard, Wilson argues that her work provides a broader analysis of elite women in early modern Ireland within a specific time frame. In this regard, she suggests that her research positions elite women centrally within an extended examination that enables the collation of individual experiences with a view to discerning trends within her chosen cohort. In her commitment to uncovering what she terms “their hitherto obscure contribution to Irish history” (5), Wilson proposes to investigate how the lives of these women evolved within the period in question and to situate her findings within a wider British historiography. In her emphasis on establishing to what extent women in Ireland were influenced by their neighbors in Britain, Wilson combines an innovative commitment to women's history with a traditional colonial, and somewhat questionable, perspective, which positions Ireland as a provincial ancillary to England.
Admittedly, Wilson's focus is both determined and informed by her choice of archival materials. In effect, the women who are most frequently discussed in the study were members of five core families (Butlers, Boyles, Brodricks, O'Briens, and Conollys) who have been selected on the basis of the relevant extant (and relatively large) collections of primary documents. However, reference is made to the experience of other women in order to expand the study's geographic and elite social scope. Accordingly, Wilson argues that these women constitute a cross-section of the Irish elite between 1690 and 1745, and that these five core families are illustrative of different levels of affluence and political status. Moreover, she proposes that, since these women hailed from across Protestant Ireland and Britain, that their testimony is illustrative of how social, political, and cultural values were transmitted from the larger island to its smaller neighbor. Wilson admits that only the occasional Catholic woman makes an appearance in her narrative. However, she maintains that generic experiences, such as childbirth and social routines, configured along lines of gender and status, obviate the confessional imbalance of her evidence.
Wilson convincingly structures her analysis of the material around the most common life experiences of elite women, sequentially presented over seven chapters. Accordingly, she begins with the negotiated processes that resulted in marriages, and then the options available to women when their marriages failed. In chapter 2, she deals with the challenges faced by women in giving birth to and raising children. In chapter 3, Wilson examines women's domestic responsibilities while married, and, in chapter 4, she provides an account of how women managed and directed the estates of their underage sons. The last three chapters are taken up with discussion of women's social, political, and philanthropic roles. Overall, Wilson makes a persuasive case for the ability and success of her subjects to negotiate change at a time of profound social, political, and religious ferment. She argues strikingly that they played a vital function in the fashioning and endorsement of Protestant Ascendancy authority through their promotion of English cultural values. Likewise, Wilson suggests that elite women deployed entertainments and philanthropic institutions based on English exemplars to bolster the aspirations of the Ascendancy in a country where the majority Catholic population was systematically excluded from access to the legal and political establishment. Wilson concludes that her subjects were characterized by a blending of the insular with the cosmopolitan and that they selectively adapted English practices to suit their environment.
Wilson's adept command of her archival sources results in a successful study. However, the inclusion in this cohort of Juliana Boyle, Lady Burlington, an Englishwoman who never actually set foot in Ireland, hardly complements the validity of Wilson's thesis. The complaint of Barbara Reilly of county Roscommon, in 1744, that her young son spoke only Irish (54), reminds us that Wilson's elite women were but one element in the varied cultural, social, and linguistic landscape of early modern Ireland.
