About

This project seeks to publish online in blog format the diary of novelist, historian and activist Rosamond Jacob, making the entries available online 100 years after they were written, beginning with her observations of the aftermath of the Easter Rising in Dublin. These diaries are an extraordinary archival treasure of 171 volumes held in the manuscript collections of the National Library of Ireland. They give a detailed account of Jacob’s life and world from 1897, when she was just 9 years old, to her death in 1960.

This website focuses primarily on volumes 32-43, which cover the period 1917-22, during which Jacob published her first novel, Callaghan and became a ‘footsoldier’ (Lane 2010) in the battle for Irish independence. Jacob was a suffragist, republican and feminist from a Quaker tradition whose fiction and historical writing are ripe for reappraisal. Her diaries are, in many ways her masterpiece. Given the range of Jacob’s interests and political and cultural contacts, her diaries are relevant to a broad range of researchers working on Irish literature and history. While excerpts from them are available online, at present research access to the full text is only available through use of the originals and digital versions in the manuscript room of the National Library. It is our hope, that by making a portion of the diaries in blog post form, we will increase the research and teaching use of the diaries.