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Easter widows: seven Irish women who lived in the shadow of the 1916 Rising. By McCoole Sinead. Pp 447. Dublin: Doubleday Ireland, 2014. £22.99.
At home in the Revolution: what women said and did in 1916. By McDiarmid Lucy. Pp 285. Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 2015. €25.00
Sinéad McCoole focuses on seven women whose lives were changed forever not only by the Easter Rising, but by the men they married: Áine Ceannt, Kathleen Clarke, Lillie Connolly, Agnes Mallin, Muriel McDonagh, Grace Plunkett, and Maud Gonne McBride. The result is a fascinating treatise on love, marriage, women’s work and family life in early twentieth-century urban Ireland. Courtship was sedate and tentative at all social levels: Michael Mallin, a soldier in India, was one year and ten months writing to Agnes Hickey, a hospital attendant, before they started using first names. They were introduced by friends, but respectable couples could and did strike up acquaintance on the street: Lillie Reynolds, a domestic servant in Dublin, first encountered James Connolly when they were both waiting for a tram. According to family lore, he was attracted to her because she was ‘refined in an unassuming way’ (p. 69). Fanny O’Brennan, a clerk, was reared in the precincts of the South Dublin Union where her mother was a wardmistress; she met Edward Kent in the Gaelic League and so Fanny and Eddie became Eamonn and Áine. Kathleen Daly gave up a successful dressmaking business in Limerick to marry Fenian ex-prisoner Tom Clarke. Muriel Gifford first encountered Thomas McDonagh when he came to lecture to the Irish Women’s Franchise League; the shyest of the six Gifford sisters, she had worked at a succession of jobs including poultry instructress....