Surveying the literature, they consider both the extraordinary publication successes of those women and the social and political context that enabled those successes-not least significant changes in educational policy, greater literacy and an expanding publishing industry. Pilz and Standlee’s introduction helpfully outlines current and historical contexts, noting how, ‘over the course of these decades, Irish women entered the literary marketplace in conspicuously large numbers’ (2). Yet the collection explores what are, in many cases, unjustifiably neglected works, and where some of them have been less neglected – as in the case, for example, with Constance Markievicz’s writings – this book nonetheless provides new insights into the complexities of the writers and their time. Ably edited by Pilz and Standlee, it develops interconnected and robust interrogations of the gender and sexual politics of what was not only a time of great dynamism in Irish culture generally, but also of unprecedented success for its women writers. Building on the pioneering scholarship of recent decades on Irish women writers, it advances the case for a radical reconfiguration of the politics and literature of the period. Over twelve fascinating chapters, Irish Women’s Writing 1878-1922: Advancing the Cause of Liberty provides a wealth of fresh insights and compelling analysis of hidden or neglected treasures of Irish women’s writing. Their book charts the lineage of something else that was ‘stirring’ in Revival Ireland, in the intellectual vanguard of Irish womanhood. It is therefore hugely important, as we move toward the centenary of the Irish War of Independence, that Pilz and Standlee’s sparkling volume sets out a timely corrective to the ways in which, as they put it, ‘Irish writing has often been conceived in the popular imagination as a male phenomenon’ (1). Here, class and gender politics have played second-fiddle. The compelling postcolonial politics of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Ireland-a context of acute political disenfranchisement and disenchantment-has produced an over-focus on high politics and important men, and in writing, on those works that sent out ‘certain men the English shot’. If the eminent Revivalist’s self-aggrandisement has been deflated by histories of the period, the prism through which the Irish Revival is understood nonetheless invariably takes on an androcentric lens. Yeats, ‘all that stir of thought which prepared for the Anglo-Irish War, began when Parnell fell from power in 1891’, when ‘the race began, as I think, to be troubled by that event’s long gestation.’ Yeats portrayed himself as something of a Prospero figure whose poetic sorcery ‘troubled’ the ‘race’, though Roy Foster and others have drawn attention to the chronological inaccuracies in the Abbey doyen’s neat sense of causation here. Amid the efflorescence of Irish writing that emerged during the Irish Literary Revival, an enchanting epochal image conjures one great man passing the burden of Irish national renewal on to another. Irish intellectual life was revitalised in the tumultuous decades of revival and revolution covered by this important book. Irish Women’s Writing 1878-1922: Advancing the Cause of Liberty, edited by Anna Pilz and Whitney Standlee, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2016, 280 pp., £70.00 (hardback),
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