repeated down the centuries and found in the life of Nano Nagle. At the conclusion of their book, the authors indicate that further organisation, classification and cataloguing of historical material pertaining to the Presentation Sisters continues apace. In the course of this work new material and resources for future researchers will surely emerge. These will lead to further studies on Nano Nagle, on how her inspiration was taken on by those intrepid companions who knew her, and by those who were drawn later to join the Presentation Sisters. This book will remain an essential resource for researchers and serve as a well-constructed bridge to these future studies. This is the achievement of the three authors of this fine book. Dr Phil Kilroy RSCJ is a historian and former provincial of her order in Ireland. Her Madeleine Sophie Barat – A Life was published by Cork University Press in 2000. Women Writing War: Ireland 1880-1922, Tina O’Toole, Gillian McIntosh and Miriam O’Cinnéide (eds) (Dublin: UCD Press, 2016), 190 pages. In their introduction, the editors explain that the objective of the book is to investigate the ways in which women’s writing in and about Ireland conceptualises conflict in the period 1880–1922. These years include the Land War, the Second Boer War, the War of Independence, the First World War and the start of the Civil War. In addition to a preface by Margaret Ward, an introductory chapter by the three editors, an essay by Lia Mills on her 2014 play, Fallen, together with a short extract from the play, there are more than half-a-dozen chapters on women writers. The writers include Anna Parnell, Anna Blunt, Winfred Letts, Alice Stopford-Green, Eva Gore-Booth, Agnes O’Farrelly and Peggie Kelly, who wrote under the pseudonym of Garrett O’Driscoll. All the essays are filled with interesting information and insights. The reader may be drawn to one or other according to taste. Only a flavour can be given here. Some women write poetry, some prose, some both. Some write in the Irish language as well as in English. Agnes O’Farrelly, a founder member and chairperson at the inaugural meeting of Cumann na mBan in April 1914, penned the first Irish language poetry collection to be published by a woman. This was Áille an Domhain, published in 1927. Her first poetry collection, Studies • volume 108 • number 431 356 Autumn 2019: Book Reviews Studies_layout_AUTUMN-2019.indd 124 21/08/2019 09:14 Out of the Depths, written in English, had been published a few years earlier in 1921. Rióna Nic Congáil, who writes the essay on O’Farrelly, says that it was only when Máire Mhac an tSaoi published a collection of poetry in Irish in the 1950s that critical attention began to be paid to women writing poetry in Irish. When the National University was established in 1908, O’Farrelly obtained a job as lecturer in Irish in UCD. Among her students was Brian Ó Nualláin (Myles na gCopaleen). While unimpressed by her spoken Irish, Ó Nualláin described O’Farrelly as having ‘a heart of gold’. Notwithstanding her qualities and ability, Nic Congáil says that she became ‘a marginalised and ridiculed figure’ because she saw the role of Cumann na mBan as occupying a subordinate position vis-à-vis the Volunteers. Hannah Sheehy-Skeffington remarked that ‘Any society of women which proposes to act as “an animated collecting box” for men cannot have the sympathy of any self-respecting woman’. Inevitably, a split occurred in Cumann naBan. Winifred Letts, an English-born writer who spent many years in Ireland, is the subject of an essay by Lucy Collins. Letts’s father was an English clergyman and her mother was Irish. When her father died, she and her mother moved to Dublin where she attended Alexandra College. Letts is described as ‘a prolific prose writer’ and one of the few women to have had plays produced in the Abbey. She published two volumes of poetry in 1913 and 1926, entitled Songs of Leinster and More Songs of Lenister. Letts is probably best known for her war poems published in 1916, Hallowe’en Poems of...