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Life
1770-1806; eldest dg. of Rev. Nicholas Herbert and his wife the Hon Martha [née] Cuffe (m.1766; d.1811); lived in rectory at Carrick, in S. Tipperary; jilted by a certain John Roe in 1789; she remained unmarried; her diary, published in 1929 as Retrospections, contains a memoir of the Rebellion; MS continues to 1806 and was only published in half; the MS descended from her br. Nicholas (rector of Knockgrafton), to the Mandeville family; poems, plays and novels from her hand have not survived; Retrospections was reissued with an introduction Louis M. Cullen in 1988.
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Works
The Retrospections of Dorothea Herbert (Dublin: TownHouse 2004), 432pp.
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Criticism
Barbara Hughes, Between Literature and History: the Diaries and Memoirs of Mary Leadbeater and Dorothea Herbert [Reimagining Ireland] (Berne: Peter Lang 2010), 255pp.
Note: Books Ireland notice of Hughes book speaks of her Herbert’s memoirs [i.e., Retrospections] as depicting her own descent into madness but also containing much information the wider socierty around her. (See Books Ireland, May 2010, “First Flush”, p.116.)
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Reference
A. N. Jeffares & Peter Van de Kamp, eds., Irish Literature: The Eighteenth Century - An Annotated Anthology (Dublin/Oregon: Irish Academic Press 2006), gives extracts from Retrospections, covering the years 1776, 1778, 1779, 1784, 1785, 1786, 1787, 1788 [381-91]
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