There is no shortage of books about the English country house, but far fewer address country houses in Ireland or focus squarely on women, so this volume forms a very welcome addition to the literature. The editors, Terence Dooley, Maeve O'Riordan, and Christopher Ridgway, have assembled a wide variety of essays by English and Irish scholars with the aim of throwing new light on the role of women in shaping and running landed estates and demonstrating that they were no mere bit players in the history of the country house. The collection offers a good balance of contributions on British and Irish women, but with just four chapters exploring earlier periods, the focus is firmly on the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While the center of attention is always women from landowning families, the topics being explored range from radical politics through reactions to the Rebecca Riots and recipe books.

The chapters fall into one of four broad themes: estate and family management, gardens and architecture, political engagement, and family networks. The first of these is covered in the chapters by Philip Bull, Caroline Dakers, Edmund Joyce, and Fiona White, who each demonstrate the active role played by women as wives, widows, and dowagers in shaping the social and economic milieus in which they were situated. Dakers's contribution is especially revealing of the way that the shift from marriage to widowhood could be empowering for some and extremely limiting for others. Amy Boyington, Judith Hill, and Anna Pilz all show that women could be central to the development of gardens, parks, and houses, both through the process of design and the subsequent management of projects and environments. Hill also shows how this role could be obscured from contemporaries and too often ignored by historians. Political women form the center of attention for Jonathan Cherry and Arlene Crampsie, Lowri Ann Rees, Ciarán Reilly, and Ridgway. They show how some women engaged with national as well as local politics over a sustained period, although Cherry and Crampsie cast some doubt on the effectiveness of elite women's involvement in bolstering grass-roots support. In exploring social and familial networks, Kerry Bristol, Ruth Larsen, Regina Sexton, and Brendan Twomey all note the particular importance of female relations and especially sisters in shaping and maintaining these complex webs of interpersonal contacts, most often through letter writing and visiting, but more occasionally through the pages of recipe books. Such relationships were built up over time and endured over long distances, although Bristol helpfully reminds us that family relationships were not always positive.

Surprisingly, these important structural themes are not made explicit through the organization of the book. Rather being arranged thematically or even chronologically, the chapters are organized alphabetically, so that we jump from Larsen's discussion of sisterly networks in eighteenth-century Yorkshire, to Pilz's assessment of Lady Gregory's forest management in early twentieth-century County Galway, to Rees's analysis of the response of Jane Walters to her experience of the Rebecca Riots in mid-nineteenth-century Wales. Nor are overarching themes easily discerned from the introduction to the volume, which largely contents itself with letting the chapters (and the women) speak for themselves. And, of course, they have plenty to say. Reading this book, we get rich insights into the daily lives, social concerns, likes and dislikes, cultural and political ambitions, trials and triumphs, and legacies of an extraordinary variety of women. Some were truly remarkable: Rosalind Howard was a political maverick, Mildred Darby was a famous author who trod a perilously fine line between elite sociability and social criticism, and Catherine Maria Bury was a pioneer of Gothicism in Ireland. Equally important are those, probably more typical, who did nothing exceptional, yet still contributed in important ways to life in the house and the surrounding community, and who thus sustained family and the estate from one generation to the next.

So, in answer to the editors’ key question—“What did these women do?”—they did many and varied things, all of which left a mark on the archival record, the fabric of the house, the political and cultural milieus, and the lives of their families. Ultimately, it is very clear that these women, like all women, had agency. They worked within constraints of politics, family, community, and gender, but also shaped these structural frameworks, just as they shaped the country houses in which they lived. But I am left wondering whether more could have been achieved through this book by asking why this matters to the broader sweep of history, or even to gender history or the history of the country house. In the opening of his chapter, Twomey laments the absence of women and their letters from the wider history of Ireland, but there seems to have been a collective reluctance to attempt this in these essays. Only occasionally do we see authors relate their findings to the broader historiography, as opposed to the historical context. Looking at Britain and Ireland together over two centuries could have revealed something more of the ways in which women's agency responded to (local) sociopolitical contexts or changed over the longue durée. In offering a wealth of fascinating details and insights, this book raises more questions than it answers, which is perhaps not such a bad thing.