In recent years the role of women in country houses and estates across Ireland and the UK has been the focus of greater attention. Chatelaines, mothers, wives, daughters, widows, sisters, housekeepers and maids were ever-present figures in the microcosm of the country house. New research has begun to reveal the extent of their involvement in managing households and estates, influencing design, adopting public roles, championing good causes, as well as raising families, and committing their thoughts to paper in literary expression. This volume of essays, many of which draw on hitherto unseen...

To counterbalance the hierarchies and justifications of modern life, there are voices raised in protest, like Eduardo Moga's, which don't mourn a presumed lost golden age ... That phase was left behind for Moga long ago, and we must presume he underwent an apprenticeship of disappointment: the discovery that the gods do not love us...

" 'Fear is the liquid state of / pain as a wound is the solid state of / fear.' Mariano Peyrou's pulsating and mesmerizing meditation on love, time, and memory, here elegantly translated by Terence Dooley, is at once minimalist and expansive: its subtle repetition of key nouns and verbs creates a dreamscape in which 'two parallel lines meet / in your eyes.' If parallel, how can these lines meet? The path to understanding repeatedly confronts a mountain, because 'Similarity / and difference only become apparent / with time.' Peyrou's Possibilities in Shade is a beautiful love poem, an...

Master of Distances consists of a hundred or so prose fragments fluctuating between dream, nightmare and a harsh reality: the bleakness of ageing, and accompanying the loved one through a long and debilitating illness.

The Enchanted Isles begins with a dream in which Oh, the narrator, returns to a voyage he made to the Galápagos - known as enchanted because of their danger-ous currents, which lured seamen to their deaths - ten years earlier. It was to be a voyage of enchantment, a lovers' voyage, an eight-day cruise paid for by a magical win at roulette, the number eight coming up eight times in a row. But in the meantime, Ah and Oh have separated, and so the memory dream is shot through with regret and also with a sometimes nightmarish vision of the ugly black volcanic islands where Darwin, observing...