The Memoirs and Diaries of Judith Isobel Chavasse: An Account of Life in West Cork and Waterford (1867-1935)

Using her hitherto unpublished personal memoirs and diaries, together with other family sources, this book documents the life of Judith Isobel Chavasse (1867-1935), who was brought up in New Court House, Skibbereen, from the age of 2. While the story of her childhood and early adult years is told through her memoirs, which she wrote a few years before she died, the second stage of her life, from the age of 25 to 65, is told through an almost complete set of diaries. This part of her story involves her courtship, 15 years of married life spent at Whitfield Court, Kilmeaden, Co. Waterford, where she raised her four sons (a fifth died in infancy), and their move in 1913 to Castletownshend, in West Cork, where they lived in Seafield, a large house overlooking the bay. The final two years of Judith’s life, when she had abandoned her diaries to write her childhood memoirs, are told through the surviving diaries of her husband, Major Henry (Hal) Chavasse (1863-1943).

The book gives a snapshot of gentry family life through the backdrop of the Boer War, the First World War and the Irish Troubles, and provides a fascinating insight into the daily actions of a lively and popular woman who was very attached to the big houses in which she lived (especially New Court, sold in 1908), and whose main concerns were the welfare and education of her sons, the lives of her three sisters (Bess Somerville-Large, Sue Fitzgerald and Hats Haythornthwaite) and their families, the wider Fleming and Reeves families, her relationship with her domestic staff, especially the endless problem of finding and retaining a good cook, and church affairs.

The book also details Judith’s friendships with the women of the local gentry (including novelist Edith Somerville) and in some cases the aristocracy, and her contribution to voluntary parish and war work.

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