Quiet Tide: Haunting story of a forgotten botanist
Marianne Lee’s debut novel is an exemplary act of reclamation and literary ventriloquism
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.