DAUGHTERS OF IRELAND

A sweeping saga à la Tara unmasked: Ireland’s King family (the Lords Kingsborough) through feudalism’s death struggle with the rise of republican thought in the late 18th century.

Historian Todd also tracks England’s pioneer feminist (Mary Wollstonecraft: A Revolutionary Life, 2000) into a year’s service as the Kingsboroughs’ governess and tutor to their two young daughters, both faced with the prospect of a privileged life as members of an Anglo-Irish aristocracy, also known as the Ascendancy, that effectively held the unpropertied Irish majority firmly in sway through the English Crown’s puppet Parliament in Dublin. By the author’s estimation, a year of Wollstonecraft was enough to inoculate Margaret (the elder) and Mary King with revelations on the sorry state of womanhood that led each in her own way to reject the typical arranged marriage. “It was remarkable,” the author comments, “that any aristocrats, raised by servants to consider their own desires paramount . . . ever managed to live together [as man and wife].” While Mary winds up in a sordid affair with a married man who may be her mother’s relative, Margaret sublimates her loveless union as Lady Mount Cashell into clandestine support of the United Irishmen, an avowed nonsectarian (initially) group dedicated to severing political ties to England and permitting Catholic representation in Parliament. Things do not go well for either daughter: Mary attempts suicide, a family disgrace; Margaret remains an anonymous patriot as the opposition is forced underground by Dublin edicts and the situation devolves into the failed, bloody 1798 Rebellion culminating in the 1801 Act of Union, and in which the King family is associated with atrocities (in the name of Church and Crown) that, along with even worse reprisals, initiate two centuries of sectarian violence—and counting.

Feminism, republicanism, nationalism: at least one -ism too many.