Mere Bagatelles: Women's Diaries from Ireland, 1760–1810

Honorable Mention in the ACIS Robert Rhodes Prize for Books on Literature, 2024

An Open Access edition of this book will be available on publication on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library.

Engaging with previously overlooked diaries by women in Ireland, written between 1760 and 1810, this book opens new avenues concerning authorship and female agency, transforming our understanding of women’s contributions to both literature and culture. The result of extensive archival research across multiple international archives, this book presents an entirely new corpus that demonstrates the creativity and literary capabilities of women in this period.

The surviving diaries showcase these women’s engagement with a form that allowed them to explore their subjectivity and to experiment with the presentation of self. This book demonstrates how these ‘bagatelles’ should be treated as literary works that were shaped by, and in turn influenced, wider cultures of reading and writing, underlining the generic fluidity at play. The diary form forces a dismantling of the neat binaries of public and private, of imaginative and non-imaginative prose writing, complicating our understandings of each. The content of these diaries prompts a re-evaluation of the very contours of Irish writing and what we consider as literature, while allowing us to rediscover the importance of manuscripts to our explorations of literary culture.

UK Delivery:

• Free delivery on all orders of £10 or more.
• £1.49 delivery fee on orders below £10.
• UK orders are shipped via Royal Mail 2nd Class.

International Delivery:

• Flat rate delivery charges vary by country.

Dispatch and Delivery Times:

• All orders are shipped from our warehouse in Northampton, UK within 48 hours of receipt during working hours.
• UK mainland orders typically arrive within 3-5 working days via Royal Mail 2nd Class.
• International estimated delivery times:
• Europe & Channel Islands: 7 to 10 working days
• USA: 7 to 15 working days
• Rest of the World: 9 to 21 working days

View our full delivery infomation here.