The most interesting contributions to the essay collection are those that are grounded in research of relatively underexplored archival material. This focus on “ordinary women’s agency, experiences, interpretations and eyewitness perspectives” in relation to the Great Famine and famine-related migration is furthermore explored from a wide array of disciplinary perspectives, including historiography, literature, socioeconomic history, and education (9).

It seeks to remedy a lacunae in Great Famine research about ways in which women experienced and shaped “the tragedy that unfolded in Ireland” and aims to shift emphasis away from male historical agency. In view of this, Christine Kinealy’s, Jason King’s, and Ciarán Reilly’s edited collection Women and The Great Hunger is a valuable contribution indeed. Sadlier’s novel is just one among many works of fiction that digresses from the conventional representations of women as spectacles of hunger and imagines them as more active with famine relief. Meanwhile, Ousely’s daughter Eleanor openly criticizes her father’s support of proselytism and treatment of tenantry, converts to Catholicism, and brings food to the starving. The tenant’s wife Honora O’Daly, epitomizes famine, with her “countenance pale as death, eyes sunken and hollow, and lips colorless as those of a corpse.” N onetheless, she is far from passive: she goes to landlord Ousely’s mansion to demand lower rent and to defy his condition for relief, conversion of her family to Protestantism.

Mary Anne Sadlier’s novel about the Great Famine, New Lights or Life in Galway (1853), demonstrates that women were not always represented as victims of starvation, but also as active agents trying to intervene in class conflict and the provision of relief. Hamden, CT: Quinnipiac University Press, 2016, + 236 pp. Edited by Christine Kinealy, Jason King, and Ciarán Reilly.

The Great Hunger by Cecil Woodham-Smith