This selection of letters is drawn from women from every background - the big houses of the Anglo-Irish gentry, small farms scattered throughout the countryside, urban slums and middle-class houses. They tell of Irish women's concerns, their sorrows and joys, their friendships and their thoughts on contemporary issues. Maud Gonne McBride writes to W.B. Yeats in 1916; Nora Barnacle declares her love to her future husband - James Joyce; Irish emigrant Mary Cumming tells her sister about her voyage; and other less well-known women exchange thoughts on their day-to-day lives and the times through which they lived.