Abstract
While salon gatherings were overwhelmingly literary in emphasis, they were clearly not divorced from the wider social and political world. As Ireland struggled to gain parliamentary independence in the late 1770s and early 1780s, an atmosphere was created which allowed women to assert their own independence and to promote the importance of female participation and visibility within the public sphere.2 The position of salon hostess was central to the place of women in public life, and thus the prestige of the salon would have again risen as Ireland gained temporary legislative independence in 1782, in what has become known as Grattan’s Parliament. However, despite this brief elevation, literary associational life, and salon life in particular, was severely disrupted throughout the country as a whole during the turbulent 1790s and the early-nineteenth century.
It is astonishing the changes that have taken place in the little circle of my intimacy within a few years….1
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Notes
Lady Morgan, Lady Morgan’s Memoirs, Autobiography, Diaries and Correspondence, vol. 2 (London, 1862) 22.
Elizabeth Sheridan, The Triumph ofPrudence over Passion, ed. Aileen Douglas and Ian Campbell Ross (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2011) 24. See
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For further details of the 1798 Rebellion see Ian McBride Eighteenth–Century Ireland (2009) although as McBride notes in speaking of’98: “no single event has received more attention from the current generation of Irish historians,” 346.
Maria Edgeworth, The Absentee, in The Novels and Selected Works of Maria Edgeworth, ed. Heidi Van de Veire, Kim Walker, and Marilyn Butler, vol. V (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1998).
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Stefanie Stockhorst, ed. Cultural Transfer through Translation, The Circulation of Enlightened Thought in Europe by means of Translation (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2010) 7.
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© 2015 Amy Prendergast
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Prendergast, A. (2015). “Dublin Is Attribilaire” — The Changing Nature of Elite Sociability. In: Literary Salons Across Britain and Ireland in the Long Eighteenth Century. Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137512710_7
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