Rebel Daughters: Ireland in Conflict 1798 - Brief Article - Book Review

Contemporary Review, Jan, 2004

Rebel Daughters: Ireland in Conflict 1798. Janet Todd. Viking. [pounds sterling]20.00. 400 pages. ISBN 0-670-91116-X. The role of the great Anglo-Irish families has over the years attracted both academic interest and popular fascination. Among the most fascinating were the King and Fitzgerald families.

This book concentrates on Lord and Lady Kingston and their family and on the uprising of 1798 in which the couple's children were divided: a daughter supported the revolutionaries whilst a son opposed. That same year also saw the Earl tried for the murder of his wife's cousin and in her account of that fateful year the author mingles the personal history of the family with the doomed uprising. Prof. Todd has given readers a 'good read' in which high politics and low behaviour mingle. (One query: presumably the 'prayer beads' (p. 321) given to the Kingston's daughter, Margaret, by Pope Pius VII were really a Rosary?)