When Elizabeth Danvers appeared in Dublin to report on her family's losses in the Irish rebellion on 14 August 1645, she must have been a piteous sight. Having been driven from her home in county Cork twice, she and her family had lived as refugees for the better part of four years. During this time, they had seen their possessions plundered and had been threatened on several occasions with physical harm. For a time, they had lived in hastily thrown-up lodgings on the boundaries of a New English planter estate in county Cork, barely subsisting. When she made her deposition, Danvers was completely destitute and had lost at least one of her children as a result of the depredations she and her family had suffered.

To English readers of hundreds of tracts and pamphlets published in late 1641 and 1642, the Irish rebellion was an episode of spectacular violence in which bloodthirsty Catholics slaughtered the primarily Protestant and English population of the Stuart plantations. The Danvers deposition contains many of the same ingredients as the tracts, including frightening rebels, deep poverty, forced eviction, and flight. However, in contrast to contemporary printed accounts of the rebellion, Elizabeth Danvers's story contained scant information about violence and focused instead on the experience of survival. Danvers documented escape and perseverance, and did so in ways that challenged the crude depictions of the Irish rebellion pamphlets.