Amy Prendergast, Mere Bagatelles: Women’s Diaries from Ireland, 1760-1810
Amy Prendergast, Mere Bagatelles: Women’s Diaries from Ireland, 1760-1810, Liverpool, Liverpool University Press, 2024, 235 p.
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1Amy Prendergast’s excellent monograph published in 2024 by Liverpool University Press takes as its primary material, as its title indicates, diaries written by women in Ireland in the second half of the 18th century, down to the first decade of the 19th century. Prendergast’s very original book is the result of thorough research which led to the collection and analysis of texts produced as diaries by women whose voices have seldom been echoed throughout history. The scope of the work gathered in this book is impressive, both in the number of diaries researched and in the way the analyses and conclusions drawn are presented to readers in a synchronic manner, which makes the book a thoroughly captivating read. The introduction and five chapters are preceded by six sections which detail the rigorous approach of the research in unpacking such intimate archival material. The long list of acknowledgements is followed by a list of figures, a list of abbreviations and a list of the diarists studied in the book. This stands as a frame to better capture the ways in which those diaries have come to be studied together as a diverse corpus, the main common point being the fact they were written by women living in Ireland in the years leading to the Irish Rebellion and slightly after. The following introductory section explains the manuscript transcription policy and warns readers against certain elements contained in the diaries that tell of abuse and might be upsetting.
2Apart from analysing a vast collection of diaries, Prendergast’s book is a success in many other ways, not least because in addition to achieving a synthetic analysis of the rich contents of the diaries, it also paves the way for future research in this field. The detailed 24-page long bibliography retraces the manuscript sources found in archives in Ireland, the United Kingdom and the United States, indicating the reference numbers in said archives, to ease the job for other scholars. The bibliography also makes a clear distinction between printed primary sources, general printed primary sources and secondary sources. Finally, a twelve-page index including concepts and names is a fine help to browse through the book.
3Each in their own way, the five chapters shed light on the thin border between factual day-to-day lifewriting and the influence of the then new genre of novel writing; but also on the thin border between the private and public spheres. The diaries raise the issue of intentional writing for a specific readership (friends, relatives or a posthumous readership). Across the chapters, the emphasis is also laid on the tension between social conventions, literary conventions and the building of an individual self through diary writing, but also on the particular vulnerability of those women, who were writing in their time and age. Prendergast devotes the last chapter on those women’s perspectives on the places in which they were writing, whether social or natural places, often idealised places, as well as the words and language they had access to, in order to embrace the varied realities of their lives in the contexts that were theirs. The introduction is equally thorough and extremely useful to ground the main thesis of the book scientifically. In her remarkable introduction, Prendergast addresses issues of definitions, foregrounding the diaries as literary works, while also highlighting the intersection with the Protestant tradition of self-examination. Indeed, in an Irish context, the diaries found are drawn from the minority of the population. Very few Irish Catholic diaries have come down to us, if they ever existed. All the diaries unveil an intersectional perspective on the self, varying according to age, gender, religion, place, and class. As Amy Pendergast indicates in the afterword, any 21st-century scholar or reader is humbled by the personal texts accessed in the diaries, and above all by what remains secret, unspoken of and therefore unknown to us more than two hundred years later.
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Référence papier
Marie Mianowski, « Amy Prendergast, Mere Bagatelles: Women’s Diaries from Ireland, 1760-1810 », Études irlandaises, 50-2 | 2025, 178-179.
Référence électronique
Marie Mianowski, « Amy Prendergast, Mere Bagatelles: Women’s Diaries from Ireland, 1760-1810 », Études irlandaises [En ligne], 50-2 | 2025, mis en ligne le 05 décembre 2025, consulté le 18 janvier 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/etudesirlandaises/21319 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/15aac
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