‘Womanish epistles?’ Martha McTier, female epistolarity and late eighteenth-century Irish radicalism

Abstract

ABSTRACT. This article examines the epistolary practice of Martha McTier, the sister of the Ulster Presbyterian radical and founding member of the United Irishmen, William Drennan. Drawing on literary analyses of the eighteenth-century epistolary form and Jürgen Habermas's account of the development of the public sphere, it argues that through her personal correspondence McTier was able to construct herself as a political subject, engaging in the oppositional discourse of the radical public sphere. The public reputation which McTier earned as a letter-writer and the fact that her correspondence was subject to government surveillance in the build-up to the 1798 Irish rebellion challenges the designation of the female letter as an essentially private medium, concerned with the personal and domestic, and suggests a more fluid relationship between women, letter-writing and the public and private spheres.In 1740 Samuel Richardson published the epistolary novel Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded. Its publication has been variously identified with key moments in the development of the psychological novel, in the transition from manuscript to print culture, and in the evolution of the categories of private and public in the eighteenth century.[1] Moreover, the figure of Pamela secreted in her closet, pouring her innermost thoughts and feelings into her letters, has raised multiple questions about the relationship between women and the epistolary genre. The enormous success of the novel has been interpreted as signalling a public appetite for the female epistolary voice in the eighteenth century, an appetite that has been explained by the apparent interrelation between women, letters and the private sphere, and