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Will there ever be enough books about women? Mary MacSwiney, biographies of women, and Irish history

Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: The latest book from renowned biographer Leeann Lane on the uncompromising (the author's own term) Mary MacSwiney builds upon her previous studies of Rosamond Jacob (2010) and Dorothy Macardle (2019).All three biographies are acutely observed and sensitively rendered accounts of women who lived through Ireland's tumultuous bid for independence and the shocking aftermath of political dissent.All three are also about women who were prominent in their own time but whose work and legacies were lost, and who did not attract plentiful biographical analysis before Lane's studies.All three have also been produced by University College Dublin Press, now leading the way in the publication of biographical accounts of women in Ireland.Mary McAuliffe's biography, Margaret Skinnider (2020) and Trish Ferguson's study, Maud Gonne (2019), are both part of the 'Life and times' series, placing these biographies of prominent women alongside contemporaries such as Cathal Brugha, Sean Lemass, Frank Ryan, Thomas Kettle and more.In the case of Skinnider and Gonne, a certain amount of 'rescuing' by feminist historians has also had to be done to their reputations and legacies, validating and valorising the physical bravery of Skinnider and detangling Gonne's reputation from her role of muse and mother, and her own unique activism.UCD Press has also produced McAuliffe and Harriet Wheelock's The diaries of Kathleen Lynn (2023), Margaret Ward's biography of Hanna Sheehy Skeffington, Fearless Woman (2019), and is leading the way in publishing women's words: Sonja Tiernan's two volumes of Irish women's speeches (2021; 2022) and the publication of Anna Parnell's Tale of a great sham, edited by Dana Hearne and including an historical overview by Margaret Ward (2020).This suggests a healthy interest in women's lives, especially those that made headlines during their lifetimes, not always the case in considering the patriarchal norms that shaped women's lives in the past and often confined women to the invisibility of the private sphere.Lane's latest monograph offers a chance to reflect on the fields of women's history and political biography, shown in this case to be overlapping, raising new questions about the lack of scholarly research on MacSwiney in the past.Of the three biographical subjects so far researched by Lane, MacSwiney is perhaps the more conventionally 'famous' (or infamous) for her steadfast political views so vociferously expressed throughout her lifetime and most potently in her two-hour-and-forty-four-minute-long speech during the Anglo-Irish Treaty debates.How is it, then, that she has not attracted more attention?Is it MacSwiney's
DOI: 10.1017/ihs.2026.10122
Language: English
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $3,550
OpenAlex ID: W7161544263
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