The Diary of Elizabeth Dillon Edited by:Brendan O Cathaoir

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Elizabeth Mathew is remembered chiefly as the wife of John Dillon, a leading advocate of the Irish cause for Home Rule at Westminster for nearly 40 years. However, her diary is a testament of her own unique unfolding as a spirited young woman, as a member of a family of distinguished pedigree and as an Irish Catholic living in England.

As the daughter of an Irish Catholic judge in England and the wife of an Irish nationalist leader, her diaries kept from the age of 14 until her death aged 42 in 1904 portray both a public world that has vanished and a private self that endures. The diaries are spiced by sharp observation of her fellow humans and illuminate with immediacy the several interesting worlds in which she passed her tragically short life. Furthermore, while displaying an acute political consciousness, her accounts shed light on an upper middle-class family in late-Victorian England; a vibrant social history.

This book has been meticulously edited from an estimated 800,000 words in her 38 journals, preserved among the Dillon papers in Trinity College Dublin, by Irish Times journalist and historian, Brendan O Cathaoir.