Historical aspects of the country house in Ireland beyond the architectural have received increased scholarly attention over the past decade, and recently the women of these houses have been the focus of dedicated studies. For the most part, though, the sounds of elite daily life have eluded historical investigation, despite the fact that material traces and documentary evidence – specifically of music – survive. Music making was integral to social and cultural life both within and beyond the country house and one of the necessary ‘accomplishments’ for women of, or aspiring to, social rank and fortune. Contemporary conduct books such as The Young Ladies’ Conduct, or, Rules for Education, published in London in 1722, promoted the idea that ‘music refines the taste, polishes the mind; and is an entertainment, without other views, that preserves [young ladies] from the rust of idleness, that most pernicious enemy to virtue’. The concept of music as a suitable female diversion was also propagated by women themselves in Britain and Ireland in the Georgian, and later the Victorian, eras. There was, according to Grace, Countess Granville and Viscountess Carteret (1654–1744), ‘no accomplishment so great for a lady as music, for it tunes the mind’. The majority of women were not as prominent as Lady Granville – whose titles were granted suo jure (in her own right rather than through marriage) in January 1714/15 – and have been relegated to obscurity. However, historical evidence of music and related activities can be used to create narratives of these women’s lives, homes and surroundings, restoring them to the social and cultural historiography of the Irish country house.

The Irish country house – the residence of a landowner at the centre of a landed estate held in freehold or owned outright and leased in smaller parcels to tenants – had its heyday with the Protestant Ascendancy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Prior to this, as the British crown confiscated and regranted land, the country residences of landowners typically took the form of defensive castles or fortified tower-houses. Political stability and greater economic growth following the accession of the House of Hanover to the kingdoms of Great Britain and Ireland, in 1714, encouraged Protestant landowners to become more settled and more prosperous; several built new, fashionable, unfortified homes.