Rebel Daughters: Ireland in conflict 1798 by Janet Todd

Decline and fall of an Anglo-Irish dynasty

A number of things about this book are misleading. The dust-jacket, by Joseph Wright of Derby, illustrates Romeo and Juliet, nothing to do with Ireland. The 1798 rebellion provides the substance of just one chapter. And the "rebel daughters" are not so much politically as domestically insubordinate. Nevertheless, Janet Todd's book adds up to an absorbing account of colonial Ireland before and after the Union of 1801.

It opens with an heiress, Caroline Fitzgerald, married at 15 to Robert King, Lord Kingsborough, barely a year her senior. Contempt for her husband didn't prevent the unmaternal Caroline from embarking on prodigious breeding. She and her second child, Margaret King - the first and most prominent of the rebel daughters - were at loggerheads, and Caroline had little time for her eldest son, George. Throw in the lack of affinity between George and Margaret, and the stage is set for clashes and dramas. The United Irish uprising, with its divisive effect on the family, is only one.

It is likely that Rebel Daughters is an offshoot of Janet Todd's life of Mary Wollstonecraft. For a period during the 1780s, Wollstonecraft was in Ireland, at Mitchelstown, Co Cork, employed by the Kingsboroughs as governess to their daughters Margaret and Mary. Her influence was considerable, especially on serious-minded Margaret. It is possible, says Janet Todd, "that without this catalyst, neither sister would have strayed from the path mapped out for aristocratic girls".

Margaret joined the Society of United Irishmen, became a minor novelist and a runaway wife. Mary got herself into a more routine predicament by bearing the child of her mother's married cousin Henry Fitzgerald - an escapade resulting in the murder of Fitzgerald by Mary's father.

The year of these sensational events was 1797, when the whole country was in an uproar. Ascendancy high-handedness, military brutality and the forlorn hopes of reformists continued unabated. Within the United Irish movement, informers and agents went about their deadly business. The Irish cause was doomed to be lost yet again. The movement's non-sectarian ideals disintegrated, with the burning of Protestant hostages at Scullabogue a turning-point for many sympathisers.

Margaret is both a product of her times and a critic of Ascendancy irresponsibility. After the Union (which she opposed) she removed herself from Irish politics. The Kingsborough clan petered out in degeneracy and lunacy. If there is any satisfaction in contemplating this end to their abuse of power, there is none in the fate of their town and country houses, their legacy to the Irish people. They dwindled into slums or - like the Kingsboroughs' Mitchelstown Castle - were looted and burnt before a factory and sewage works rose in their place.