Daughters of Ireland by Janet Todd

Daughters of Ireland by Janet Todd

They were known as the Ascendancy, the dashing aristocratic elite that controlled Irish politics and society at the end of the eighteenth century--and at their pinnacle stood Caroline and Robert King, Lord and Lady Kingsborough of Mitchelstown Castle. Heirs to ancient estates and a vast fortune, Lord and Lady Kingsborough appeared to be blessed with everything but marital love--which only made the scandal that tore through their family more shocking. In 1798, at the height of a rebellion that was setting Ireland ablaze, Robert King was tried for the murder of his wife's cousin--a crime born of passion that proved to have extraordinary political implications. In her brilliant new book, Janet Todd unfolds the fascinating story of how this powerful Anglo-Irish family became entwined with the downfall not only of their class, but of their very way of life.

Like Amanda Foreman's bestselling Georgiana, Daughters of Ireland brings to life the world of a glittering elite in an age of international revolution. When her daughters, Margaret and Mary, were at their most impressionable, Lady Kingsborough hired the firebrand feminist Mary Wollstonecraft to be their governess, little realizing how radically this would alter both girls' beliefs and characters. The tall, striking Margaret went on to provide crucial support to the United Irishmen in the days leading up to the Rebellion of 1798, while soft, pleasing Mary indulged in an illicit, and all but incestuous love affair that precipitated multiple tragedies.

As the Kingsboroughs imploded, the most powerful and colorful figures of the day were swept up in their drama--the dashing aristocrat turned revolutionary Lord Edward Fitzgerald; the liberal, cultivated Countess of Moira, a terrible snob despite her support of Irish revolutionaires; the notorious philanderer Colonel George King, whose sexual debauchery was matched only by his appalling cruelty; Britain's cold calculating prime minister William Pitt and its mad ruler King George I.

With irresistible narrative drive and richly intimate historic detail, Daughters of Ireland an absolutely spellbinding work of history, biography, passion, and rebellion.

From the Hardcover edition.

Janet Todd is an internationally renowned scholar of early women writers. She has edited the complete works of England's first professional woman writer, Aphra Behn, and the Enlightenment feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, as well as novels by Charlotte Smith, Mary Shelley and Eliza Fenwick and memoirs of the confidence trickster Mary Carleton.

Janet Todd is the general editor of the 9-volume Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jane Austen and editor ofJane Austen in Context and the Cambridge Companion to Pride and Prejudice. Among her critical works areWomen's Friendship in Literature, The Sign of Angellica: Women, Writing and Fiction 1660-1800 and theCambridge Introduction to Jane Austen. She has written four biographies: of Aphra Behn and three linked women, Mary Wollstonecraft, her daughter, and her aristocratic Irish pupils. Lady Susan Plays the Game is her first foray into fiction.

In the 1970s Janet Todd taught in the USA, during which time she began the first journal devoted to women's writing. Back in the UK in the 1990s she co-founded the journal Women's Writing. Janet has had a peripatetic and busy life, working at universities in Ghana, the US, and Puerto Rico, as well as England and Scotland. She is now an emeritus professor at the University of Aberdeen and lives in Cambridge.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780345447630
ISBN 10	0345447638
Title	Daughters of Ireland
Author	Janet Todd
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Random House USA Inc
Year published	2005-03-01
Number of pages	368
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note	Unavailable