Summary

In Chapter 5, “an unscientific mishmash”, Doireann resumes her daily cleaning routines in the months that follow her daughter’s birth. In the wake of finishing her translation of the Caoineadh, the narrator consults “scholarly volumes [and] histories of eighteenth-century Ireland […] to find all the information [she] can on Eibhlín Dubh’s life, no matter how obscure or tangential” (68). She does not know why she is so attached to the eighteenth-century poet, but she feels compelled to continue her search for more information about Eibhlín Dubh, a woman whose life is largely obscured and dismissed in academic texts. Later, Doireann visits the abbey in Kilcrea that Eibhlín Dubh would have visited during her youth. Doireann devises a plan to subvert the lens through which the poet’s life has been told by “luring female lives back from the...