“Irish historians,” so one critic commented recently, “hunt in packs” (Colm Tóibín in Dublin Review, Autumn 2003, 12). The deep and long-standing divisions within the telling of the Irish story have created identifiable schools and traditions, which might be read as an intriguing insight into the mechanics of history as both political instrument and academic discipline. Nadia Clare Smith's assessment of Irish women historians from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries, in various ways, reinforces this view of a divided and contested past and rescues various significant public intellectuals and academics from the condescension of posterity. The study is to be welcomed as a thoughtfully researched insight into the role of women historians at the intersection of gender, politics, and historiography, during “the heroic age” of Irish history writing.

Acknowledging her debt to Bonnie G. Smith's seminal work on The Gender of History (Cambridge, 1988), Nadia Smith examines the lives of a number of historians who survived and flourished both inside and outside the academy during the volatile period of Ireland's transition from British colony to independent republic. What emerges is an important new perspective on the role of women in shaping historiography in ways often underestimated or unrecognized and, occasionally, ignored. Her research thoughtfully teases out the continuities and exchanges between different generations. Consideration of how these individual historians connected with wider cultural and political networks, at a time when Ireland produced many of the most radically minded women of the age, would have lent even more resonance to the analysis.

The opening chapter looks at four historians from Protestant and Unionist families who, against the grain of their backgrounds, made valuable contributions toward shaping public understanding of early Irish culture. These were the Irish-language scholar, Eleanor Hull, founder of the Irish Texts Society; Mary Ferguson, a popularizer of antiquarian research, who helped legitimize the history of early Celtic Ireland in her work The Story of the Irish Before the Conquest (London, 1868); the poet and novelist, Emily Lawless, author of The Story of Ireland (New York, 1887); and Mary Agnes Hickson, whose research into the sectarian wars of 1641–42 propelled her into a long controversy about the authenticity of atrocity evidence.

A specifically nationalist school of history is identified through consideration of Margaret Cusack, author of the first history of Ireland from a nationalist and “faith and fatherland” perspective. Her contemporary, Alice Stopford Green, is the most widely remembered of all the individuals examined. Her marriage to the Oxford historian, J. R. Green, and her work editing and revising his best-selling A Short History of the English People (New York, 1892) gave her access to the leading historians of the day. From the 1890s, under the influence of Irish-language scholars and philologists, she rejected her Oxford mentors and took a radical turn toward both Irish nationalism and altruistic internationalism, driven by a belief that women, in order to gain access to power, must devise alternative systems of influence to male-dominated political systems. Her friendship with the African travel writer, Mary Kingsley, resulted in the foundation of the African Society (renamed the Royal African Society after Stopford Green's death) and the creation of an important nexus of women and men interested in African affairs. Her influential narrative, The Making of Ireland and Its Undoing (London, 1909), helped shape the nationalist imagination at a moment of acute political polarization. In 1914, she was instrumental in planning and financing the running of guns used in Dublin's Easter rebellion and became the first Irish woman senator after the founding of the Irish Free State in 1922.

Stopford Green's successor, as both activist and historian, was Dorothy Macardle, born into a wealthy family of brewers. More republican than nationalist, Macardle was imprisoned in Kilmainham for her antitreaty views and remained uncompromising in her support for the democratic and nonsectarian dimension of Irish republicanism. Her monumental work, The Irish Republic (1937), remained for decades the most widely read explanation of the revolutionary period. In addition to history, she wrote novels, plays, and criticism, which turned her into a figure of international standing.

If Ireland's best-known women historians worked outside the academy, women also had considerable success attaining positions within the university system. Four women taught within the National University of Ireland in the early part of the century. The feminist Mary Hayden taught at University College Dublin from 1909 to 1938 and remained socially and politically active throughout her tenure. Her textbook A Short History of the Irish People (Dublin, 1921) continued on as the most popular textbook until the 1960s and contributed toward stabilizing the consciousness of a historically troubled state. The history department at University College Galway was dominated in the post-1922 period by the contrary figures of Mary Donovan O’Sullivan and Sile Ni Chinneide who, as colleagues, hardly spoke. Trinity College, traditionally a bastion of male chauvinism and unionism, produced three influential historians—Constantia Maxwell, Olive Armstrong, and Jocelyn Otway-Ruthven.

In the postrevolutionary period, Ireland was awash with amateur historians, the diversity of their views and narratives reflecting a divided and unsettled nation. In 1938, the founding of Irish Historical Studies at Senate House in London endeavored to assign academic history writing with “scientific” status, but a popular and irregular tradition lived on undaunted. A final chapter looks at several of these nonacademic historians, notably Helena Concannon, Rosamond Jacob, Isabel Grubb, Grace Lawless Lee, and Ada Longfield, whose work reached a wide and supportive public. One striking theme linking many of these lives is a strong ethical engagement with national and international politics. Radical feminism, social reform, internationalism, and the reorganization of education are common themes linking these careers to reveal a group of determined women committed to both interpreting the past and improving the present.