This collection of essays is a much-needed addition to the current scholarship on the Parnell family. Donal McCartney, president of the Parnell Society, and Pauric Travers, the director of the Parnell Summer School, are well placed to assess existing scholarship on the Parnells and to extend our knowledge of the family's many contributions to civic life in Ireland and in the United States.

The volume features five essays each by McCartney and Travers, along with four graveside orations delivered by McCartney. The coauthored introduction, “Commemoration History,” asserts the necessity of framing historical commemorations within the evolving cultural history of the nation. The essays in this collection are themselves commemorative, written “by the joint authors mainly for public events organised by the Parnell Society, established in 1986, as part of its mission to promote an interest in the life and times of the Parnell family and their relevance for contemporary Ireland” (1). The collection succeeds in arguing for the necessity of further scholarship on the life of not only Charles Stewart Parnell but also his family. Historical misperceptions of Parnell's relationships with his mother, Delia, his brother, John Howard, his sisters, Fanny and Anna, and more famously with his wife, Katharine O’Shea Parnell, have clouded the historical record for over a century, and McCartney and Travers assess how these misperceptions and exaggerations have often served contemporary political purposes.

As the Ivy Day ceremonies recede into the past, the history of which is well documented in Travers's essay “‘The Thurible as a Weapon of War’: Ivy Day,” our collective knowledge of Parnell and his circle recedes as well. How well do we know Parnell and his family, apart from the scandals and the myths? “Not very well,” assert the two authors, who argue that Parnell's enigmatic personality and his singularity within competing nationalist traditions have rendered his memory hard to contain. McCartney argues, in the essay “Parnell: Nationalism and Romance,” that Parnell does not fit the stereotypes of the Romantic Nationalist, relying always on a deeply felt pragmatism regarding the political landscape of mid-nineteenth-century Ireland. “Although surrounded by colleagues and allies who were responding to the quickening of cultural nationalism and the Irish-Ireland ideal, the proclaimed leader of the Irish race at home and abroad remained untouched by the subject” (10).

Perhaps the greatest contribution the volume makes is the careful attention both authors pay to Parnell's ties to America. In “Parnell and the American Connection,” McCartney argues that “his successful exploitation of the American connection set the pattern for Irish nationalist leaders after him” and recounts how vital the influence of the American Land League was in carrying Parnell to victory in the general election of 1880 (55). McCartney also devotes an essay to John Howard Parnell's changing fortunes as a peach farmer and agricultural innovator in Alabama. John Howard, he writes, “had almost been annihilated from the past. In his own lifetime, and ever since, his star had been dimmed because of the very brightness of his brother’s” (123). America is also where sister Fanny established the Ladies’ Land League in October 1880, and it is also where she died and is buried. The Parnell family's American connection, through Delia, Parnell's American-born mother, is often cited anecdotally as a source of Charles Stewart Parnell's anti-British sentiment, but this, too, is brought under scrutiny; in “Parnell's Women,” McCartney argues that “it was her children, Charles, Fanny and Anna who bestowed on her the sentimental Irish nationalism … she loved to proclaim. She had imbibed whatever anti-English politics she held from them—and not the other way round” (71).

In “Reading between the Lines: Political Speeches,” Travers contends that the often-repeated assertion that Charles Stewart Parnell “was no orator” ignores the impact of Parnell's speeches on his public, which is often easier to gauge than the actual content of the speeches themselves (57). Parnell's notable lack of rhetorical flourish belies a “distinctive and powerful style as a public speaker” (61). The essay is a thoughtful examination of the pitfalls of relying on reports of speeches as an indicator of political philosophy. Incomplete, elusive, and at times contradictory, the surviving record of the speeches requires “considerable care” on the part of historians and biographers.

The historical record regarding Anna Parnell is similarly troubled, and Travers devotes an essay to Anna's complicated place in the history of Irish nationalism. Jane Côté's Fanny and Anna Parnell: Ireland's Patriot Sisters (Dublin, 1991) is the only full-length treatment of the women to date, and Travers remarks that we still “lack a full-scale history of the Ladies’ Land League and our knowledge of Anna's life after 1882 is episodic and incomplete” (125). The picture that emerges in Travers's account is of a woman born too early for her destiny as an ardent Irish nationalist. Estranged from her brother after the disbanding of the Ladies’ Land League in 1882, Anna lived in England under an assumed name until her death in 1911. Her history of the Ladies’ League, Tale of a Great Sham, remained unpublished until 1986, and according to McCartney, her book of poetry, Old Tales and New, only appeared in print thanks to John Dillon, who gave £50 to the publisher on the sly in order to assuage Anna's financial difficulties. Travers attempts to rescue these poems from what others, including Côté, have argued is a well-deserved obscurity. His analysis of her political metaphors notwithstanding, the poetry remains difficult to appreciate next to the poetic gifts of her sister Fanny. Travers’s attention to Anna's legacy is a necessary reminder that there is still much to be uncovered about the role of women in the history of Irish nationalism.

The Ivy Leaf: The Parnells Remembered is both sympathetic and elegiac toward its subjects, as one would expect in a collection of essays written primarily to commemorate events in the great family's life, and yet the essays are also deeply rooted in scholarship. The essays are not purely disinterested, objective works of historical research, and for that readers must be grateful because we are in the company of two men deeply invested in their subject, both with a great deal of intelligent personal observation to share. This general sympathy toward Charles Stewart Parnell is never hagiographic; McCartney and Travers are as fascinated by the man's foibles as by his achievements and present an evenhanded review of his life, his political accomplishments, and his fascinating family.