Mere Bagatelles: Women's Diaries from Ireland, 1760-1810 - (Liverpool Studies in Irish Literature) by Amy Prendergast (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Honorable Mention in the ACIS Robert Rhodes Prize for Books on Literature, 2024

An Open Access edition of this book will be available on publication on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library.

Engaging with previously overlooked diaries by women in Ireland, written between 1760 and 1810, this book opens new avenues concerning authorship and female agency, transforming our understanding of women's contributions to both literature and culture. The result of extensive archival research across multiple international archives, this book presents an entirely new corpus that demonstrates the creativity and literary capabilities of women in this period.

The surviving diaries showcase these women's engagement with a form that allowed them to explore their subjectivity and to experiment with the presentation of self. This book demonstrates how these 'bagatelles' should be treated as literary works that were shaped by, and in turn influenced, wider cultures of reading and writing, underlining the generic fluidity at play. The diary form forces a dismantling of the neat binaries of public and private, of imaginative and non-imaginative prose writing, complicating our understandings of each. The content of these diaries prompts a re-evaluation of the very contours of Irish writing and what we consider as literature, while allowing us to rediscover the importance of manuscripts to our explorations of literary culture.

Review Quotes

'Mere Bagatelles is an excellent piece of scholarship, an absorbing read and a significant addition to early modern Irish women's studies. The voices of the women themselves are given primacy; the text brims with their feelings and experiences: some humorous, many devastating.'

Angela Byrne, Women's History Association of Ireland

'This fascinating study makes an important contribution to scholarly understanding of women's diaries and Irish women's literary history in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It is meticulously researched and the extensive archival material is sensitively and skilfully interpreted to provide rare insights regarding women's lives and writing. This engaging book also has wider significance for studies of female authorship and agency, manuscript culture and uses of the diary form, as part of a wider conversation regarding life writing in the period.' Amy Culley, Associate Professor in English, University of Lincoln