In the millennial year 2000, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin published an essay on the nineteenth-century poet Speranza, claiming her as a foremother. Ní Chuilleanáin asks: ‘what use our female predecessors are to us as writers, what is the function of model, teacher, exemplar?’3 What Irish women poets seek when they conjure foremothers is continuity: a ‘women’s tradition’ that legitimises the writing of their own poetry; influence aside, a sense of ‘the woman writer as embodied, creative agent in the process of textual production’, to use Jennie Batchelor’s phrase.