In this chapter, Catherine Morris focuses on the Revival as part of a revolutionary era in Irish history, an era that saw the formation of national identity and national institutions. She shows how revival feminism links the freedom of Ireland to the freedom of women by focusing on the artistic work and social and political thought of neglected or under-studied feminists and activists such as Maud Gonne, Lady Augusta Gregory, Eva Gore-Booth, and Helena Molony. Prominent in this group of activist feminists was Alice Milligan. Milligan’s writings offer a rich context for grasping the idea that activist feminists shaped the Revival and provided an intersectional political space for women. She provides a way to reconsider the importance of the Irish Revival and to emphasize forgotten or neglected elements of it. Morris’s research on revival feminism, but especially her work on Milligan, becomes itself part of the revivalist continuum of political engagement.

In her chapter, Maureen O’Connor shows how feminist revivalists, in their writings and political work, experienced the Irish landscape and nature as powerful forces in the conception of “Irishness.” Revival feminists give voice and prominence to the supernatural, which has long been a component of Irish folklore. While writers such as Alice Milligan, Ethna Carbery, Eva Gore-Booth, and Hannah Lynch were critical of the dominant revival narrative – particularly when it romanticized rural Ireland and its “rustic” landscape or created gendered stereotypes about the land and Irishness generally – their work nevertheless embodied the revival insofar as it focuses on how time and political struggle are embedded in the landscape. The critique of violence and masculine power is especially important in works by latter-day revivalists such as Eilís Dillon and Edna O’Brien, who take aim at masculinist conceptions of the struggle for Irish freedom in the War of Independence and in late-twentieth century conflicts in Northern Ireland.