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The Politics of Honor in Lady Ranelagh's Ireland

Lookup NU author(s): Dr Ruth Connolly

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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.


Abstract

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.


Publication metadata

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


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