Mere Bagatelles : Women’s Diaries from Ireland, 1760–1810

Abstract

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.