Reintroduces nineteenth-century Irish women novelists and prose writers into the context of literary history and brings new critical and theoretical perspectives to bear on their writing.

This collection contains new readings of nineteenth-century Irish women's prose works by a wide range of international scholars. The authors place nineteenth-century women's writing in new contexts and offer a fresh view of the nineteenth century through women's literary perspectives. The authors covered include: Elizabeth Hamilton, Lady Blessington, Selina Bunbury, Margaret Hungerford, M.E. Francis and Somerville and Ross.

The articles draw attention to writers who have been previously ignored in Irish Studies and discuss women's contributions to literary genres commonly associated with male writers. Serious attention is also given to devalued genres such as the romance. The authors also examine prose writing that does not fit the usual categories and they research the cultural and material contexts of women's literary production. The authors read nineteenth-century Irish women's works according to the main themes that emerge in the novels and texts, not according to any overarching principle based on aesthetic or ideological criteria. This means that the contexts in which women's writing are usually understood are often changed. Although most of the writers discussed lived in various parts of Ireland, the designation 'Irish' has been widened to include also authors whose works were important in the country but who themselves did not live there.

Heidi Hansson is an Associate Professor of English Literature, Umea University, Sweden, and is author of Romance Revived: Postmodern Romances and the Tradition (Uppsala, 1998) and Emily Lawless 1845-1913: Writing the Interspace (Cork, 2007)