This chapter examines the engagement of Irish women poets of the Romantic period with the politics of their age, while also analysing their relationship to their British and Irish literary predecessors and contemporaries. After an introductory section, the essay explores the engagement of Henrietta Battier and Mary Leadbeater with the politics of the 1790s, in particular the Society of United Irishmen and the antislavery movement. It then turns to the post-Union period, and the circle of writers associated with two interrelated families, the Sheridans and the Lefanus, in Dublin, before looking north to the work of two Ulster women poets, Mary Balfour and Anne Lutton. The final section of the chapter considers Louisa Stuart Costello's poetic response to Napoleon’s career, her cosmopolitanism, and her work as a translator.

Archipelagic approaches to eighteenth-century poetry have played a part in rescuing Irish women’s poetry of this period from being read through an exclusively Anglocentric lens. In its cultural encounters between native Gaelic culture and colonial settlers, eighteenth-century poetry is rarely straightforward in its identifications. Often women poets, as in the case of Dorothy Smith, would frame their work through an address to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. Though Britain will often be cast as the civilising force, the woman poet takes on the role of intermediary, pleading Ireland’s cause and defending her honour on the wider stage. Another complicating factor is the precarious economic situation of the poet seeking patronage as she makes these appeals, as we see in the work of Dorothea DuBois. The poems of Henrietta Battier and Mary O’Brien offer further permutations in what is a complex cultural landscape. Condescending English attitudes to Ireland are turned back on English audiences with witty defiance, as the female voice of Anglo-Ireland comes into its own.