Women of the country house in Ireland is a much-needed volume exploring the lives of elite women and the homes they managed in Ireland. It covers a period of declining power for landed families and, therefore, builds on the pioneering research of scholars such as Terence Dooley and Olwen Purdue. This monograph arrives in the same year as Women and the country house in Ireland and Britain, a co-edited collection by O'Riordan, Dooley and Christopher Ridgway, and continues that book's project of bringing female agency to the fore. With these two significant publications, O'Riordan addresses the relative absence of research on gender and the Irish country house – her monograph taking an encompassing approach and dedicating a chapter to each of the following themes: house and estate; courtship; married life; producing heirs; family and friendship; taste and talent; female lives outside of the home; and philanthropy and activism. In this way, the book offers the reader an introduction to each of these fascinating and substantial fields of enquiry – subjects one hopes will have their own dedicated studies in the near future.

O'Riordan makes excellent use of a fragmented historical record to flesh out these women's lives. The majority of the research is based on archival finds, but she occasionally brings the evidence of visual and material culture to bear – deepening and extending her analysis of subjects such as the wedding day and the exercise of female taste. However, the source base is confined to the landed families of Munster, which is described ‘as a microcosm of the island of Ireland, as it was dominated by poorer agricultural land in the west, and tillage and a strong farming class in the east’ (p. 5). Through this sample, O'Riordan is able to show the high level of integration between Irish and British elite families of this period and it was often London, rather than Dublin, that loomed largest in these women's cultural landscape.

Chapter one offers a good sense of the diversity in scale of Irish estates and the implications this had for female experience. Marriage looms large in this book, not only as a key life event for elite women but also as a mechanism for consolidating (or divesting) money, property and – with it – power. Family life, marital relations and child rearing are recognised for the critical roles they played in brokering and negotiating power relations both locally and across more distributed British and imperial networks. Female agency is recorded most fully in the chapters attending to friendship (chapter five), taste (chapter six) and life outside of the home (chapter seven). Whilst the landed wife sits at the heart of this book, O'Riordan also pays attention to the different roles and experiences of unmarried daughters and sisters (see, for example, Nelly O'Brien's lack of privacy and autonomy in chapter six).

There are places in this book where a different focus might have revealed more about the agency and influence of elite Irish women. For example, chapter five – with its distinction between professional and amateur practitioner – is slightly at risk of replicating the frame of ‘polite accomplishments’ and down-playing the significance of female creative activity. Chapter seven might have included activities such as letter-writing as a method by which women exerted influence beyond the parameters of the household, in some cases creating new environments for thought, engagement and action.

O'Riordan ends her study in 1914 rather than tracing these families’ changing fortunes through to the mid-century, as Dooley's and Purdue's respective studies chose to do. The conclusion tantalisingly describes some of the dramatic changes that took place in this period of war and revolution and rather begs the question – should this volume have followed these women and their houses through these tumultuous years? The answer might lie in the thematic breadth of the book, which is impressive, and perhaps a plan for a second book dedicated to the complex developments of the twentieth century.

In summary, this book ought to enjoy great success because of the important work it does in opening up a rich field of enquiry. O'Riordan's insightful analysis is a real pleasure to read and no mean feat in a challenging archival context. Women of the country house in Ireland more than achieves its goal of bringing women's contributions into the foreground of our histories of elite life in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Ireland and opens the door for future explorations of gender and power in this stratum of Irish society.