Irish women writers entered the British and international publishing scene in unprecedented numbers in the period between 1878 and 1922. Literary history is only now beginning to give them the attention they deserve for their contributions to the literary landscape of Ireland, which has included far more women writers, with far more diverse identities, than hitherto acknowledged.This collection of new essays by leading scholars explores how women writers including Emily Lawless, L. T. Meade, Katharine Tynan, Lady Gregory, Rosa Mulholland, Ella Young and Beatrice Grimshaw used their work to advance their own private and public political concerns through astute manoeuvrings both in the expanding publishing industry and against the partisan expectations of an ever-growing readership. The chapters investigate their dialogue with a contemporary politics that included the topics of education, cosmopolitanism, language, empire, economics, philanthropy, socialism, the marriage 'market', the publishing industry, readership(s), the commercial market and employment.

Foreword by Lia MillsIntroduction - Anna Pilz and Whitney Standlee1 Works, righteousness, philanthropy, and the market in the novels of Charlotte Riddell - Patrick Maume2 'She's nothin' but a shadda': the politics of marriage in late Mulholland - James H. Murphy3 Nature, education, and liberty in The Book of Gilly by Emily Lawless - Heidi Hansson4 Girls with 'go': female homosociality in L. T. Meade's schoolgirl novels - Whitney Standlee5 'Breaking away': Beatrice Grimshaw and the commercial woman writer - Jane Mahony and Eve Patten6 Women, ambition, and the city, 1890-1910 - Ciaran O'Neill and Mai Yatani7 'An Irish problem': bilingual manoeuvres in the work of Somerville and Ross - Margaret Kelleher8 'A bad master': religion, Jacobitism, and the politics of representation in Lady Gregory's The White Cockade - Anna Pilz9 'Old wine in new bottles'? Katharine Tynan, Lord Edward Fitzgerald, and George Wyndham - Kieron Winterson10 'The blind side of the heart': Protestants, politics and patriarchy in the novels of F. E. Crichton - Naomi Doak11 'The red sunrise': gender, violence, and nation in Ella Young's vision of a New Ireland - Aurelia Annat12 Liberté, égalité, sororité: the poetics of suffrage in the work of Eva Gore-Booth and Constance Markievicz - Lauren Arrington