Abstract
In Women of the Country House in Ireland, 1860–1914, Maeve O’Riordan makes a noteworthy contribution to the history of women and of the landed elite in Ireland from the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Using the province of Munster as a representative case study, the author embarks on “a group biography of a network of elite women” (19–20). In so doing, she makes a convincing case for placing these “forgotten subjects” (4) at the center of Irish country house life. Through her careful reconstruction of these women's lives, she also positions women of the country house in Ireland as part of a British—and European—landed “supranational elite” (303). The combination of the recentering of the history of the “big house” around women and their position as part of a British elite makes this book an excellent resource for historians of Ireland, of Britain, and of the landed classes in Europe.
The women in this study are not a monolithic group, as their lives, experiences, status, and politics varied. But what binds them together is their position as part of the landed elite. Though the book includes names familiar to Irish history like Lady Gregory, Constance Markievicz, and Eva Gore Booth, it is the names and stories of so many women not-so-well known that bring depth to the collective history presented. In order to give these women voice, O’Riordan deftly weaves together a wide swath of sources, from family papers, diaries, marriage settlements, newspapers, memoirs, charitable associations papers, novels, and the records of the estates themselves. The fact that this archive persists for this project is intimately tied to the elite status of the women themselves—elite women wrote, were written about, and operated in such a way that their records would later be saved.
In eight thematic chapters, O’Riordan brings to life the world of women either born or married (or both) into the landed elite of Ireland. Beginning with the physical ground that creates the conditions for a landed class, in “House and estate,” the author explores the “big house” and the expectations of those who lived in them. It is in their household duties that many women found fulfillment in developing and maintaining the prestige of the family. Their primary work was to manage households, which often required careful attention to personalities and relationships, and acted as hostesses for a wide variety of social events. O’Riordan reads diaries, newspaper reports, and prescriptive literature to lay out the planning and execution of parties, right down to the preserved hand-addressed invitation envelopes. The example of the garden party allows draws out the intricate relationship between landowners and tenants, neighbors and family, and the central role of women in building and maintaining these networks.
Having established the estate, the next three chapters move inward, from “Courtship: for love and money,” to “Matrimony and married life,” and “Producing heirs.” In considering the Irish landed elite, O’Riordan builds on the existing historiographies of marriage patterns of the landed classes in Britain and Europe to show just how integrated the elites of Britain and Ireland were. Some traveled to London for “the season” in order to secure suitable marriages within their class, many of those holding estates in Ireland, while others joined the “Dublin season” or took advantage of small parties to find partners. Though many in the study searched for personal compatibility in future partners, for most marriage was both a familial and financial arrangement. O’Riordan's inspired reading of marriage negotiations and settlements against diaries and letters shows how aware women were of the financial stakes of marriage, taking in the financial and familial implications of the arrangements.
The chapter “Matrimony and married life” identifies a point of transition in women's lives. Drawing on the richness of the source material, O’Riordan revels in the details of the “social spectacle” (104) of weddings in the later part of her study, highlighting the newspaper coverage of these events, including the dress, decorations, gifts, and photographic record. For many of the subjects, companionable marriages the norm. She reads between the lines to piece together women's experiences with sex within marriage and also finds evidence for extramarital affairs and divorce, allowing for an unsensationalized view into the intimate and sometimes complicated personal lives of her subjects. For most of the women in the study, marriage was the marker of full adulthood, and with children as the next step.
“Producing heirs” begins with expectation within marriage for the production of male heirs. With an artful reading of the sources—birth records, diaries, letters—O’Riordan brings to the fore the emotional lives of her subjects as they attempted to get pregnant, carried pregnancies to term, and wrestled with the potential for and actual complications in pregnancy and childbirth. She places childbearing as central to the continuation of the landed class, but with a caveat—mothers were congratulated on the birth of sons and commiserated with on the birth of daughters. She finds that far from being the aloof Victorian mothers often presented in contemporary literature, the women in the study revealed themselves to be loving and doting mothers, though not without the help of servants and nurses to do the dirty work. One new mother joked that her breastfeeding on demand was “turning her into a pagan; as she had to sit at home ‘to await his lordship's pleasure’” (165). O’Riordan's attention to the emotional lives of her subjects as they experience marriage and childrearing sheds new light on what we think we know about the landed elite in Ireland.
After the intimacy of courtship, marriage, and children, O’Riordan follows her subjects into more public spaces, with chapters five through eight moving outward: “Family and friendship,” “Expressing taste and talent,” “Independence and life outside the home.” Collectively, these chapters speak to many of the public dimensions of landed women's lives. The family remained the “most important social structure” (171), elite women spent time inside and outside the home with both family and close friends. It is here that the author runs up against the limits of her sources—it is challenging to piece together a complete picture of a single individual woman's social network when so many pieces are missing—correspondence burned, lost, or possibly hiding away in the family papers somewhere far afield. It was a group that did not benefit from the expansion of the national school system in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but they were not uneducated. Women of this class were generally educated at home through private lessons and through governesses, focusing on subjects like literature, languages, art, and dancing. While the subjects were “respectable pastimes” (196), they were not acceptable professions. A few women in the study published novels, but few were afforded the freedom to pursue professions as artists.
As the book continues its outward trajectory from the home and family, the author considers the ways in which her subjects expressed their taste and talents, through artistic and cultural practices, their position as consumers of culture, patrons of the arts, and in their attention to fashion and dress. Here the depth of detail found in the sources—receipt books, lists of summer hats owned (21 for Ethel, Lady Inchiquin [209])—fills in a picture of how the landed classes moved about in the world, wielding their inherited money and power as arbiters of respectability and taste. While shopping in London at the turn of the century, Mary, Lady Carbery recorded in her diary how shopping in her sables “got me a perpetual permit to examine the most secret and precious manuscripts at the British museum at my will” (207). Lady Carbery's work at the British museum appears again later when O’Riordan considers life outside the home. It is small moments like this that reveal both the strengths and weaknesses of the thematic structure—Lady Carberry's shopping trip illuminates how women like her traveled through cities as consumers, but the separation of her life as a shopper into one chapter and her work as a reader at the British museum into a different chapter limits the picture we can draw of her experiences as an individual woman in the world.
The final two chapters, “Independence and life outside the home” and “Paternalism: philanthropy and activism” bring the women of the Irish country house firmly into the public sphere in two distinct ways: through leisure activities and in philanthropy and political activism. In the world of travel, sport, and hunting, the author leans on the strength of her sources to fill in a detailed portrait of fox hunting among the landed class, and for women in particular. Here we find the dangerous but still respectable world of fox hunting, which included many women hunters, and offered a sanctioned space for flirtation and leisure. We also learn of the landscape for travel, one whose opportunities were often divided by the martial status of the female traveler. Of those unmarried women travelers, O’Riordan highlights exceptional individuals like Nelly O’Brien, who “could travel freely by bicycle, train, or boat to visit friends and relatives” (236). But one area nearly all women of the landed elite could participate was philanthropy and a certain type of politics.
In the worlds of philanthropy and politics, O’Riordan finds women's participation in politics was of the “soft power” variety, as hostesses, and generally supportive of a conservative position that maintained the power of the landed elite. But by the late 1880s, the landed elite crashed into the rising tide of the Land League and then the Land War, which further eroded their status as tenants demanded rights, undermining the traditional tenant-landlord relationship. As agrarian protest and violence escalated, members of the landed classes raised money in opposition to the Land League, clipped and saved notices of agrarian outrages, and wrote pamphlets opposing the Land League. When it came to philanthropy, many women of the landed elite participated in paternalistic networks that served to reinforce hierarchical relationships between classes, as may be expected. They donated goods, including food, handmade clothing, and fuel to the poor in the immediate vicinity of their landed estates. O’Riordan mines the papers of the County of Cork Needlework Guild to offer a new perspective on the philanthropic world of the rural, landed elite, not just those of middle-class, urban women that have often been the subject of study. While the majority of the women in the book participated in conservative politics of one stripe or another, she also provides examples of the women of this class who did not fit this mold—those who supported the Gaelic League, women's suffrage, and nationalism. Though this was an exception to the general rules of political participation for her subjects, it is important to see the breadth of opportunity and politics across the landed class.
Women of the Country House in Ireland does much more than fill a significant gap in the existing historiography of the landed class in Ireland: it firmly places women at the center of the history of the Irish country house. But it is also a story of the twilight of the very class of women that O’Riordan studies, highlighted by the end date of 1914. By the time the First World War came to an end, Ireland was undergoing its own transformation, one that would dramatically change the lives of landed Irish women. In that sense, the book stands as both testament to the lives that these women lead, but also as an elegy for a group of women whose way of life in Ireland was ending. It will be a welcome addition to the history of women in Ireland, of rural landed classes, of the elite classes Ireland and Britain, and to those interested in the lives of Irish women and families in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.