Quiet Tide: Haunting story of a forgotten botanist

Marianne Lee’s debut novel is an exemplary act of reclamation and literary ventriloquism

Although these seismic political events shape the backdrop of Marianne Lee’s novel, they happen, like so much in her protagonist’s life, off-stage

Quiet Tide

By Marianne Lee

New Island Books, €14.95

Barring exceptions such as Maria Edgeworth – remembered for her own achievements, even if her novel Castle Rackrent needed to be published anonymously – most Irishwomen whose names survive from the early 19th century are recalled in the popular imagination merely as appendages to the lives of famous men: women like Sarah Curran and Anne Devlin, remembered chiefly as Robert Emmet’s lover and his servant respectively.