Charlotte Grace O'Brien was an energetic and strong-willed Irish political reformer and writer who recorded many of her experiences, both political and personal, in her poetry. O'Brien's poems span the middle ground between traditional, sentimental light verse and modern verse that would characterize the early twentieth century. Writing during a time of literary revival in Ireland, O'Brien never achieved enduring fame as a poet; however, her contribution to nineteenth-century Irish literature is notable. Though her work often concerns stereotypical female topics of the Victorian era--domestic life, love, religion, and nature--much of it is also intellectually and politically charged, engaging social questions and controversies, especially relating to the Irish people.

Before John O'Leary, a Fenian leader, inspired young poets such as William Butler Yeats, Katharine Tynan, and O'Brien's nephew Stephen Gwynn with the words, "There is no great literature without nationality, no great nationality without literature," O'Brien had consistently...