The Daughters of the First Earl of Cork

Women’s writing in early modern Ireland continues to be a richly expanding field, advanced further by Ann-Maria Walsh’s new study of the daughters of the first earl of Cork. Richard Boyle, the first earl, younger son of a landed family in Kent, arrived in Ireland in the late Elizabethan period as part of the New English administrative and military incursion and quickly grew in position, power and wealth, ultimately leading the richest and ‘perhaps the most important family in seventeenth-century Ireland’, becoming perhaps ‘one of the most dominant and highest-achieving families in the three kingdoms’ (pp. 13, 104). Given this rapid rise and prominence, it is unsurprising that Richard, the ‘upstart’ earl, and two of his sons have received considerable attention: Roger as a soldier and playwright and Robert as a scientist. Walsh turns attention to the extensive writings left by generations of Boyle women, including the first earl’s wife, daughters, daughters-in-law and granddaughters, over this period of transition and warfare, highlighting and assessing ‘the contribution those aristocratic Protestant women made to society, politics, religion, medicine, culture [and] history, but also to Ireland’s rich and diverse literary heritage’ (p. 26). Their writing reveals a keen awareness of the family’s power, influence and elite status and, importantly, the women’s active roles in upholding and expanding that position as ‘rich marriageable heiresses, devoted wives, careful mothers, resourceful landowners, faithful servants of the crown and as diligent overseers of a dual landed heritage’ (p. 30). Fundamentally, much of the Boyle women’s writing is also deeply personal and individualised, providing detailed insight into their private lives as well as a highly-developed sensitivity to identity and selfhood in both their formation and representation

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