Sometimes, research leads to unexpected places. My 20-year obsession with the nineteenth-century travellers and diarists Martha and Katherine Wilmot has introduced me to some fascinating Irish, English and Russian women of the era. Women like Princess Dashkova, friend and confidante of Catherine the Great, first woman president of a learned academy (Russian Academy, 1783), and host to the Wilmot sisters in Russia in 1803–08. Or Margaret King, Lady Mount Cashell, an Irish republican tutored in childhood by Mary Wollstonecraft, who left her husband, earl Mount Cashell, to live in Italy with her lover under an assumed name. Prior to this scandal, she and Katherine Wilmot travelled around France and Italy together during the Napoleonic Wars. Another woman I got to know better through the Wilmots is Sarah Curran (1782-1808).

While other historians have studied Curran in terms of her role as the fiancée of martyred Irish republican Robert Emmet, the picture of her relatively short life and her story as a person in her own right was long left incomplete. Her story – wrongly told – will be known to many as the subject of Thomas Moore’s ballad, She is Far From the Land.

My research in the Wilmot and Chetwood family papers turned up previously unknown poems by Curran, preserved for two centuries in manuscripts now held by the Royal Irish Academy, Senate House Library (London) and Farmleigh House (Dublin). The poems are about love, trauma, and loss. They are also political and indicate that she may have been familiar with the Gaelic aisling tradition.

Taken together with her surviving correspondence with another Cork family, the Penroses of Woodhill, the poems enrich the existing picture of Curran’s life. She emerges from the synthesis of these sources as a person with a rich interior life, a person deeply engaged in contemporary culture – music performance and composition, the visual arts, travel writing, poetry, and folk ballads – and a person who valued her friendships deeply.

The tragedy of her last days, spent in loneliness, isolation, illness and grief after the death of her newborn son John – delivered prematurely aboard ship en route from Sicily to London – are recorded in her letters to her friends Anne and Bess Penrose. The letters make compelling reading, and I am not ashamed to admit that tears rolled down my face the first time I held them in my hands in the National Library of Ireland. Far from her dear friends, her anguish emanated from the delicate pages, betrayed by her trembling handwriting.

But there was more to her in life than tragedy – she was a charming, intelligent and creative person whose talents as a harpist and poet were greatly valued by those who knew her. Learning more about her has been an enriching experience and has added depth to my understanding of the Wilmot-Chetwood circle. Most of all, it has made me think more about friendship, the stress of isolation, and the trauma friendship loss can cause.

My article on Sarah Curran’s literary and friendship circle was published in Irish Studies Review in 2022; read it for free here.

My article on Curran’s intellectual and cultural world was published in Women’s History Review in December 2022; find it here.

I was commissioned to write Curran’s biography for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, and it will be available soon.

Please contact me for a pdf of any of these articles if you cannot access them online.