Sinéad McCoole focuses on seven women whose lives were changed forever not only by the Easter Rising, but by the men they married: Áine Ceannt, Kathleen Clarke, Lillie Connolly, Agnes Mallin, Muriel McDonagh, Grace Plunkett, and Maud Gonne McBride. The result is a fascinating treatise on love, marriage, women’s work and family life in early twentieth-century urban Ireland. Courtship was sedate and tentative at all social levels: Michael Mallin, a soldier in India, was one year and ten months writing to Agnes Hickey, a hospital attendant, before they started using first names. They were introduced by friends, but respectable couples could and did strike up acquaintance on the street: Lillie Reynolds, a domestic servant in Dublin, first encountered James Connolly when they were both waiting for a tram. According to family lore, he was attracted to her because she was ‘refined in an unassuming way’ (p. 69). Fanny O’Brennan, a clerk, was reared in the precincts of the South Dublin Union where her mother was a wardmistress; she met Edward Kent in the Gaelic League and so Fanny and Eddie became Eamonn and Áine. Kathleen Daly gave up a successful dressmaking business in Limerick to marry Fenian ex-prisoner Tom Clarke. Muriel Gifford first encountered Thomas McDonagh when he came to lecture to the Irish Women’s Franchise League; the shyest of the six Gifford sisters, she had worked at a succession of jobs including poultry instructress. There was nothing retiring about her artist sister Grace; the photograph taken of her by a Chicago journalist not long after the Rising in a light-coloured dress cradling a kitten, was a carefully crafted image of virginal widowhood. Grace’s married life was famously brief; the other women could have told her that marriage to a hero-in-training was hard work. Lillie Connolly and Kathleen Clarke were dragged from pillar to post, including across the Atlantic and back, by their restless husbands. Michael Mallin’s fierce intelligence led him to a variety of livelihoods after he left the British Army, causing many disruptions for Agnes and their growing family. Muriel McDonagh had life-threatening pre-eclampsia on her first confinement and depression afterwards; having a second baby a few years later was an act of heroism to equal anything her husband did. Áine Ceannt was at death’s door not long after the birth of their first and only child. Poor health was a constant in the lives of nearly all of these women, and living on a knife-edge of political anxiety did not help. Yet six of them at least, loved their husbands dearly and mourned them deeply. Maud Gonne was the exception; having separated bitterly from John McBride in 1906 (accusing him, among other things, of molesting her ‘niece’ (daughter), her half-sister and a friend), she gained a new lease of political life after his death by taking his name. McCoole’s flowing style blends all these stories together in a deceptively simple narrative that is as engaged as it is scholarly; a kind of closure is achieved when readers are told that the baby described as ‘my little man’ by Michael Mallin in his last, heart-breaking letter, has lived to read McCoole’s book.

At home in the Revolution promises to show how ‘issues of gender were negotiated at a time of revolution’ (blurb). Margaret Ward was the first scholar to do this, in 1982, followed by Rosemary Cullen Owens, Cal McCarthy, Ann Matthews, Senia Pašeta, Mary McAuliffe & Liz Gillis, and many others. McDiarmid’s approach is to draw connections between the political and what she describes as the ‘domestic’. Sometimes these connections are hard to follow. Mary Spring Rice’s relief at getting into a bath after the Asgard voyage is described by McDiarmid as ‘major historical events’ being incorporated into the ‘intimate spaces of the bathroom’. Here is not only a rather stretched connection between politics and female domesticity (men take baths too, and probably sometimes think about revolutions while they are in them) but the eclipse of a far more interesting insight. Spring Rice’s relieved ablutions were described in a postcard written by Alice Stopford Green (in whose house she was staying): ‘“It is an honourable thing to be a hayro,” said the cook as she got the hot bath.’ (p. 53; emphasis in original) Here, Stopford Green invokes one of the ‘people’ – a servant speaking in a local accent – to validate her friend’s patriotic act. Also, McDiarmid suggests that Mary Spring Rice and Molly Childers on board the Asgard were ‘spirited sisterly housewives’ (p. 52) whose tending of the guns was an integral part of their domestic work on the yacht. It might have been, but for both of these women from upper-class, wealthy backgrounds, housekeeping was as much a novelty as gun-running, and both are described in Spring Rice’s journal with the same brave gaiety. Loosely-defined domesticity is stretched to breaking point when used as a connective/comparative device between Spring Rice and Elsie Mahaffy, the daughter of Trinity’s provost, which simply did not work for this reader. Those irritations aside, however, this book presents many valuable extracts not only from these women’s accounts, but from other sources too, and some worthwhile comment. The three different narratives reproduced by McDiarmid here (two by the Daly sisters, one by Eily O’Hanrahan) of how the O’Hanrahan sisters learned from the Daly sisters that Micheál O’Hanrahan was to be executed, prompt reflections on memory and trauma, as well as showing how women managed strong emotions at a time of upheaval. Also reproduced are Min Ryan’s two mildly sentimental accounts of her last conversation with Seán MacDermott. Min Ryan was described by him in one of his last letters as ‘she who in all probability, had I lived, would have been my wife’ (p. 85). Such coolness was unusual among his peers, who seem to have loved women as passionately as they loved Ireland. That warmth was more than reciprocated; two women, McDiarmid tells us, were in love with Con Colbert, and she bravely suggests that some Cumann na mBan and Citizen Army women, even when avowedly feminist, did not object to being relegated to tending male bodies transfigured by revolution and sacrifice. This acknowledgement of the part played by love/sexual attraction in the Rising makes McDiarmid’s book a fitting companion to McCoole’s. Indeed, it would be difficult to write a book about the 1916 Rising that did not have relationships at its core. Both books evoke a time and place when political convictions were enhanced, complicated and sometimes even undermined, by love, friendship and loyalty.