Galway women in the nineteenth century /

Langan-Egan's short study of Galway County and city is a useful accession to the growing list of historical studies of Irish women by authors such as Joannna Bourke, Maria Luddy, and Margaret MacCurtain. As a rewritten doctoral dissertation, it bears many of the characteristics of such works, including exhaustive mining of sources and massive assemblage of detail, but also repetition and monotonous prose. Langan-Egan (National Univ. of Ireland, Galway) focuses most on the midcentury era of famine and emigration, least on the 1880s and '90s. Arranged topically, the book treats, among other subjects, employment, diet, marriage and widowhood, education, migration/emigration, and crime, and there is an impressive analytical chapter. A valuable feature is the fine collection of period illustrations. Among Langan-Egan's findings are the relative prosperity of Galway fisherfolk (with photographic evidence), the economic success of many women--especially emigrants--unencumbered by husbands, and the omnipresence of violence in the lives of Galway women (and no doubt other 19th-century Irish women). Upper-division undergraduates and above. D. M. Cregier; University of Prince Edward Island