Ann-Maria Walsh has trawled the Boyle archives in Chatsworth and Dublin as well as collections in other repositories, pulling out ‘letters, a diary and autobiography, a memorandum book, accounts books, medical receipt books, a prose treatise, and pious meditations’ that vividly bring to life a group of seventeenth-century women who lived across and between the Irish and British Isles. Though the book's title is The daughters of the first earl of Cork, and the cover features some of the daughters from the Boyle tomb in St Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin, it also includes writings by his wife, daughters-in-law and granddaughters. The writers include the earl's wife, Katherine Fenton Boyle (first countess of Cork); daughters Alice Barry (countess Barrymore), Sara Moore, Lettice Goring, Joan FitzGerald (countess of Kildare), Katherine Jones (viscountess Ranelagh), Dorothy Loftus and Mary Rich (countess of Warwick); daughters-in-law Elizabeth Clifford Boyle (second countess of Cork), Margaret Howard Boyle (countess of Orrery) and Elizabeth Feilding Boyle (viscountess Kinalmeaky); and granddaughter Frances Courteney (later Dillon, countess of Roscommon).

Walsh uses their words and their stories to weave together a portrait of this group of Anglo-Irish noblewomen, considering their roles within their families and communities, their experiences during war and peace, their networks and personal relationships, their contributions to intellectual and religious cultures, their construction of identity and self-presentation via their writing, and the impact of their ‘bifurcated existence’ and movement between Ireland and Britain. In doing so she also provides useful insights into the production and circulation of women's writing more generally.

In the first chapter, on ‘Place and identity’, the letters of the first and second countesses of Cork, and of Frances Courteney, the latter's daughter, are used to consider how women intervened in and managed estate business during the absence or illness of their husbands, how they represented these matters to their husbands, family patriarchs and friends, and the challenges of isolation and loneliness. The second chapter deals with life stages and family interactions. Consideration of motherhood and the schooling of children widen into a discussion of Katherine Jones's forward-thinking opinions on education. Some of first earl's daughters were unfortunate in his choice of their marriage partners, and the letters show them dealing with improvident husbands and marital breakdown. Letters from Alice and Elizabeth Kinalmeaky meanwhile give insights into the practical consequences of widowhood and how widows reached out to other family members for support in broaching business and financial matters with the second earl. A chapter on warfare discusses letters by Joan, Alice and Katherine Ranelagh that described their ordeals in the 1640s and attempted to leverage their connections for their own benefit and to assist others. Walsh deftly shows the strategies they and the second countess used to explain their actions and choices in times of crisis and to secure their and their families’ subsistence.

The chapter on Protestant piety and female godliness dips into the women's writings to consider some aspects of their religious faith. Mary's spiritual diary comes into its own here, illustrating aspects of her beliefs and religious practices, and how they were shaped by sermon-going and contacts with clerics from a variety of points on the Protestant spectrum. Further background reading on female writing on child death might have provided more context in the first section of the chapter and greater consideration of the women's providentialism might also have been productive. The second countess's memorandum book is the main subject of the final chapter, that considers Elizabeth Clifford Boyle's recording of family events, travel and family-related business, a process that hints at her wider ‘epistolary network’. There is also a fascinating discussion of the countess's recording (and in some cases, non-recording) of financial matters and the business of writing and rewriting her will. Walsh also highlights the materiality of the memorandum book and the evidence it provides about how the will and similar documents belonging to others were circulated and kept.

The somewhat random survival of the correspondence and other writings used makes what they reveal difficult to fit together entirely coherently: chapter one makes some large jumps across time and, despite Walsh's best efforts at corralling them, some of the other chapters jump across fairly disparate topics. There is no conclusion, just a short epilogue that largely calls for further research. Walsh is currently editing her sources for an Irish Manuscripts Commission volume and this instalment very much whets the appetite for further engagement with the Boyle women.