Recent years have seen a flurry of work and publications on both the career of the first earl of Cork, Richard Boyle (1566–1643), and his children, many of whom left a considerable impression on the history of seventeenth-century Britain and Ireland. Ann-Maria Walsh's The Daughters of the First Earl of Cork: Writing Family, Faith, Politics and Place is an important contribution to this growing corpus of work on the wider Boyle family and affinity. The central focus of Walsh's study is the seven daughters who lived into adulthood (Alice, Sarah, Lettice, Joan, Katherine, Dorothy, and Mary), nearly all of whom married senior members of the English and Irish aristocracy. Several of these were formidable figures, notably Katherine, who played a considerable role in the functioning of the Hartlib Circle from the 1640s onward. Yet the title of the book somewhat understates the range of Walsh's study. In addition to the daughters such as Katherine, Walsh pays considerable attention to the first earl's second wife, Catherine Fenton, and daughters-in-law, notably the Countess of Burlington, Elizabeth Clifford. Thus, what Walsh is engaging with is actually the broader group of Boyle women who moved in and around the family during the seventeenth century.

The chapters successively deal with the role of place for the Boyle women; the lifecycle of Boyle's daughters; their writings on war, particularly the explosion of violence that occurred in Ireland in late 1641 and early 1642; their religious dispositions; and their efforts to create their own legacy within the Stuart dominions. There is much to admire here. Chapter 3, “Women Writing War” offers a very informative account of how the Boyle women perceived the tumultuous events of the 1640s in Ireland and Britain, while there is extensive treatment of the more remarkable surviving writings of the Boyle women. These include the diary and memorandum book kept by the Countess of Burlington and the extensive diaries kept between 1666 and 1677 by Mary Boyle, who married Charles Rich, fourth Earl of Warwick, and whose personal reflections offer valuable insights into the history of Restoration England.

Easily the strongest aspect of Walsh's work is the breadth of her archival research and the exhaustive identification of texts about and writings by the Boyle women throughout the seventeenth century. The bibliography, which lists in considerable detail the manuscript correspondence, diaries, and other written works by the Boyle women, is a useful research tool itself and highlights Walsh's systematic archival scouring. As one might expect, Walsh has drawn considerably from the National Library of Ireland and Chatsworth House in Derbyshire, which house the two main parts of the enormous Boyle family archive. But she has ranged much further than this to track down voluminous material from the Bodleian Library, Claydon House in Buckinghamshire, the British Library, the Royal Society Library, and numerous other repositories. Given the breadth of this research, it is especially welcome that Walsh is preparing an edition of these writings for publication with the Irish Manuscripts Commission.

There are some problematic aspects to The Daughters of the First Earl of Cork. In chapter 1, a study of place in the writings of the Boyle women, Walsh argues that the correspondence of figures such as Alice Boyle from her home at Castlelyons in east Cork, where she had moved following her marriage to David Barry, first Earl of Barrymore, is indicative of the centrality of place to women's writing in seventeenth-century Ireland. I could not discern anything from Walsh's assessment of Alice's writings that concretely established that “place” was treated any more significantly in these letters than in most other correspondence one would come across between individuals during the seventeenth century. Perhaps most conspicuous in this regard is a section suggesting that Alice was consciously signifying the importance of “place” in her writings when she simply addressed her letters from Castlelyons. This, and many other points in this chapter, struck me as being an insufficient basis on which to argue that “place” was being treated in any particularly significant fashion in the writings of the Boyle women.

There is also very little sustained attention given here to the relationships between the first earl's daughters and Richard Boyle himself. It is understandable that Walsh has sought to avoid a lengthy treatment of the first earl in a book about the Boyle women. Nevertheless, there is no doubting the centrality of the earl of Cork in shaping the lives of his daughters, nearly all of whom were placed into marriages that Richard negotiated to further his dynastic interests. How the earl arranged these is briefly discussed at the outset, but a further section on marriage later in the book does not, to my mind, delve deeply enough into the matter. Several of these unions were deeply unhappy, notably Joan's marriage to the sixteenth Earl of Kildare, George Fitzgerald, while Lettice's relationship with her new husband, Colonel George Goring, the son and heir of the future earl of Norwich, was extremely problematic in the 1630s, not least owing to George's profligate gambling. There is considerable extant correspondence among the Cork Papers at Chatsworth House clearly showing the disenchantment of Boyle's daughters with these arrangements. Consequently, more might have been said here about the relationship between the Boyle women and the father whose decisions affected their lives so significantly, particularly so as there certainly was room to do so in a volume coming in at just over 140 pages of actual text.

These not insignificant issues aside, this is a well-researched and valuable addition to the manifold work being undertaken at present on the Boyle family during the seventeenth century. It is required reading for anyone seeking to understand the contribution of the first earl's daughters and the other Boyle women to the broader history of this much storied family.