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Lookup NU author(s): Dr Ruth Connolly
This is the authors' accepted manuscript of a book chapter that has been published in its final definitive form by University of Nebraska Press, 2019.
For re-use rights please refer to the publisher's terms and conditions.
The complex politics of early modern honor as they play out in an Irish context underlies Lady Ranelagh’s experience of a place she preferred to call ‘that countrey’. In her letters, Ireland becomes a site where a shrinking group of English settlers continue to uphold the processes of Anglicisation whilst resisting internal failures of honor within their own community. Strikingly, she transforms the identity of her estranged husband, the man she viewed as guilty of the most egregious breaches of honor, from New English into an ‘Irish breed’. The gesture symbolises a longer process in which she positions Ireland as a sign of the threats posed to her own identity and reputation. Over her fifty years of writing in and about Ireland, she concludes that the periodic domestic and political crises she undergoes in Ireland stems from failures of honor, a belief which reinforces her own conviction that Ireland was a site of colonial disorder in need of correction by principled governors.
Author(s): Connolly R
Editor(s): Eckerle JA; McAreavey N
Publication type: Book Chapter
Publication status: Published
Book Title: Women's Life Writing and Early Modern Ireland
Year: 2019
Pages: 137-158
Print publication date: 01/06/2019
Online publication date: 01/06/2019
Acceptance date: 12/04/2010
Series Title: Women and Gender in the Early Modern World Series
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Place Published: Lincoln, Nebraska
URL: https://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/university-of-nebraska-press/9780803299979/
Library holdings: Search Newcastle University Library for this item
ISBN: 9780803299979
