Will there ever be enough books about women? Mary MacSwiney, biographies of women, and Irish history

Mary MacSwiney builds upon her previous studies of Rosamond Jacob (2010) and Dorothy Macardle (2019).All three biographies are acutely observed and sensitively rendered accounts of women who lived through Ireland's tumultuous bid for independence and the shocking aftermath of political dissent.All three are also about women who were prominent in their own time but whose work and legacies were lost, and who did not attract plentiful biographical analysis before Lane's studies.All three have also been produced by University College Dublin Press, now leading the way in the publication of biographical accounts of women in Ireland.Mary McAuliffe's biography, Margaret Skinnider (2020) and Trish Ferguson's study, Maud Gonne (2019), are both part of the 'Life and times' series, placing these biographies of prominent women alongside contemporaries such as