Edna O'Brien, Sinéad O'Connor, Nuala O'Faolain, Bernadette McAliskey and Anne Enright have all dramatically communicated their own experiences as women in a patriarchal, unequal Ireland. Each of these five women is, individually, remarkable. But taken together, we witness how, in part through their composite work, the Ireland that dislocated and repelled them was itself reimagined and changed. It is precisely their intimacy with the country, including its structural injustices, that inspired their effort to create a new ethical dimension that, through a culpable ignorance, the polity had lacked. This was an idea of Ireland to which for the first time women, not men, had privileged access. In a series of five interlinked portraits, Emer Nolan shows how these distinguished women make sense of their formative experiences as Irish people and how they in turn have been understood as vibrant figures in whom liberating aspects of modernity in Ireland have been realised. Considering journalism, literature, life-writing, songs and speeches, she explores these women's responses to the legacies of Catholicism, nationalism, radical politics and Ireland's rich artistic traditions. Theirs is a condemnation and a redemption, an unforgettable achievement. This is an essential book for readers interested in current debates in modern Irish culture or in questions about gender and the nation in Ireland and beyond.