The Irish Women Writers’ Club has long featured as a tantalizing reference or paragraph in studies of Irish women's writing in the first half of the twentieth century, usually accompanied by an observation that this is an organization about which we need to know more. The club boasted a distinguished membership of mid-twentieth-century Irish writers, among them Elizabeth Bowen, Helen Waddell, Kate O'Brien, Hanna Sheehy Skeffington, Rosamond Jacob, Teresa Deevy, Maura Laverty, and founding members Blanaid Salkeld and Dorothy Macardle. Deirdre Brady's Literary Coteries and the Irish Women Writers’ Club (1933–1958) is therefore very much to be welcomed as supplying a vital gap in knowledge about the club. Extending beyond the immediate circumstances of the founding and running of the club, Brady draws on book history methodology to paint a vivid picture of the intellectual and cultural life that flourished in the Dublin of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, often on the margins of the conservative new state. In this sense, Brady provides a companion to Brian Fallon's An Age of Innocence: Irish Culture 1930–1960 (1998) while supplying a focus on female writers, artists, and intellectuals lacking in that volume.

In chapter 1, Brady sets the general cultural context leading up to the 1933 founding of the Irish Women Writers’ Club. She describes the various spaces where male and female writers, artists, activists, and intellectuals congregated in Dublin cafes, restaurants, and arts clubs—although not always, it becomes apparent, doing so on equal footing. The elitism and male dominance of the Irish Academy of Letters, established by William Butler Yeats and George Bernard Shaw in 1932, led directly to the founding of the Irish Women Writers’ Club the following year to support and promote women's writing in an atmosphere of collegiality and egalitarianism. In chapter 2, Brady traces the intricate nature of the professional and personal networks among women writers, reviewers, journalists, translators, and publishers who used their contacts to encourage, support, and promote Irish women's writing in Ireland and abroad. Her method recalls Bonnie Kime Scott's similar tracing of American and English networks of modernist women writers in The Gender of Modernism: A Critical Anthology (1990). The time lag between Scott's volume and Brady's is telling of the comparative lack of attention to Irish women's writing until recently.

One of the most visible ways in which the club promoted women's professional status was through annual banquets, reported in national newspapers, at which the Book of the Year Award was given. The award did not always go to works of fiction: history, poetry, plays, travel writing, and children's books were also honored. Brady highlights the way in which a certain book might be selected as winner or runner-up either to support a writer whose books had been banned by the state or to encourage a writer who had received a particularly harsh review from a male critic. By employing the award strategically, both as a weapon against censorship and to circumvent the masculine grip on reviewing culture, the club set up what amounted to an alternative literary canon. Another way to reclaim agency over the publishing process was to establish a private printing press. In chapter 5 Brady provides an interesting account of Blanaid Salkeld's founding of the Gayfield Press in 1937 in a bid to publish more experimental and innovative work by female and male modernists.

The inevitably fragmentary nature of women's archives hinders at times Brady's ability to provide greater detail, for example on the criterion for selection of the Book of the Year by the club's reading committee. Some events are familiar, such as the 1937 campaign against the draft constitution, which has been covered in great detail by earlier scholars, particularly Margaret Ward and Maryann Valiulis. There are one or two factual errors: Elizabeth Bowen's father suffered a breakdown before, not after, her mother's death (99); Bowen lived not in Regent's Street (100n96), but in Clarence Terrace opposite Regent's Park, and that is where The Death of the Heart is set. At times, Brady places too much emphasis on what she considers to be dissident voices in a patriarchal and conservative Irish state. With a few exceptions (Ethel Mannin is one), the writers who belonged to the Irish Women Writers’ Club came from an upper-middle-class background that gave them access to educational privileges unavailable to most Irish women who left school at fourteen either to emigrate or to be drawn into the life of domesticity and childrearing prescribed for them by the prevalent Catholic and patriarchal ideology. Although many of these women writers were disadvantaged in comparison with their male peers and often suffered financial hardship, their lives were nonetheless privileged in comparison with those of the majority of Irish women. Still, the battle had to start somewhere, and Brady makes the valid point that by keeping alive the notion of the professional woman, the club must have had an influence on Irish women struggling to enter other professions, and it foreshadowed Irish feminism of the 1970s.

Scholars have reason to be grateful to Brady for her patient archival research that knits together through a wide variety of sources—including letters, diaries, private papers, committee reports, government documents, and newspapers—a detailed account of the professional lives and work of this group of particularly active and socially engaged Irish women. The footnotes and references open up a number of issues in Irish women's writing of this period that remain to be explored.