Indeed, Callanan describes his “rhetoric of blood and soil” as “darkly fecund”. The charge that by coarsening nationalist rhetoric Healy damaged the growth of democracy in Ireland is certainly not a trivial one, and deserves fuller treatment. But here, as often, Callanan leaves the assertion hanging.The charge of opportunism also seems an odd one to level at a man who never got any political plums. After three decades in the wilderness, the nearest Healy came to the top was his largely honorific appointment as the first Governor-General of the Irish Free State in 1922. By that time, the Irish parliamentary party had been wiped out by Sinn Fein in the general election of 1918. Healy was rare among old parliamentarians in embracing the new nationalist movement. Was this just trimming, as Callanan characteristically suggests, or was it a fulfilment of his aspirations for an “Irish Ireland”?Healy certainly exulted in the political burial of his old enemy John Dillon, and was also sardonic about the dewy-eyed idealism of Sinn Fein.

After a mysterious meeting with the then-obscure Michael Collins in 1918, he noted that the young rebel had “blithered of the gorgeous precedents of the Yugoslavs”: his grasp of reality was “piteous”. Yet there was real respect in Healy’s view that by 1921 Sinn Fein had “won in three years what we did not win in 40″. The implicit verdict on the justification of political violence may be uncomfortable, and Healy may not be an easy man to admire, but he probably does not deserve the opprobrium heaped on him here.. THIS anthology consists of 11 previously untranslated autobiographical writings by Russian women whose lives “span the [19th] century and cover a wide range of classes and professions”. The second part of this claim in the book’s blurb is slightly misleading Seven of the 11 are educated women of the upper classes.

One of the remaining four is Liubov Nikulina- Kositskaia, a daughter of domestic servants (“house serfs”), whose career was entirely untypical: she joined the provincial theatre in her early teens and became a leading actress of her day. As for professions, most of those here who did work were writers or doctors. So this is not a representative selection of women’s voices from Tsarist Russia. One could hardly expect it to be, given that the majority of 19th-century Russian women did not have the ability, let alone the urge, to write an autobiography (the literacy rate for the whole population by the end of the century was perhaps 40 per cent). As for the urge, the editors rightly stress that these are literary productions, and they devote much of their preface to describing the established genres of autobiography in 19th-century Russia, and how they differ from equivalents in the West.
What is interesting, meanwhile, is to note the degree of social mobility that actually did exist in what, to many Western visitors, seemed a rigidly hierarchical society, subject to unalterable custom and the whim of the Tsar.The autobiographies (some complete, some extracts) vary in length from about 12 pages to nearly 50.