Born: 1770 (circa), Ireland
Died: 18 June 1829
Country most active: Ireland
Also known as: NA
This biography is republished from The Dictionary of Irish Biography and was written by Bridget Hourican. Shared by permission in line with Creative Commons ‘Attribution’ (CC BY) licencing.
Herbert, Dorothea (c.1770–1829), author, was born in Kilkenny, eldest among eight children of the Rev. Nicholas Herbert, rector of Carrick-on-Suir and Knockgrafton, Co. Tipperary, and his wife, Martha, daughter of John Cuffe, 1st Lord Desart. In 1782 she was a day pupil at Miss English’s boarding school in Carrick, but was otherwise educated at home. She paid long visits to Dublin and houses around the country; her social circle was wider than most clergymen’s daughters due to her mother’s connections and her father’s relative affluence of £1,800 a year, drawn from his four livings. In 1788 he built for his family the glebe house at Knockgrafton, and there in 1789 Dorothea met John Roe, son of a neighbouring family, and enjoyed a short flirtation with him, which left her besotted. She referred to herself as Dorothea Roe, even after his marriage to another in 1805. This event, together with the deaths of her favourite brother, John (1800), and her father (1803), left her partially deranged. In paranoid, hysterical language in her journals, she claimed that her mother and sisters colluded with her brothers to lock her up and deprive her of her inheritance of £1,200.
Her literary compositions had been passed around the family circle from the 1790s, and in her later years she produced numerous poems and plays and the Retrospections on which her fame lies. These were probably written in a fairly short period about 1805/6 and were largely based on journals. After her death in Knockgrafton on 18 June 1829 and burial in Carrick-on-Suir, they passed into the possession of her brother Nicholas Herbert, rector of Knockgrafton, who left them to his nephew Nicholas Herbert Mandeville. Descendants of the Mandevilles published them in 1929. A new edition, edited by the historian L. M. Cullen, appeared in 1988.
Herbert’s Retrospections are a vivid depiction of gentrified rural life against a background of popular unrest. Wide-ranging, they move from the snubs she received from her Dublin relatives for her unfashionable clothes in 1780, to the murder of her father’s proctor at Knockgrafton during the 1798 uprising. They are frequently cited by historians, though judgments vary from commending Herbert for her striking historical accuracy (Cullen, 452) to a warning that ‘her reality was refracted through her romantic imagination’ (Clarkson, 28). At their best, in the early chapters, the Retrospections are lively and humorous, with an endearing eighteenth-century bawdiness; Virginia Woolf found them randy and rollicking. The later years show a troubled mind and are less readable, though the gradual descent of the robust, amusing girl to the melancholic, hysterical spinster is of interest to feminist critics. The 1929 reviews in the Dublin Magazine and Irish Book Lover expressed disappointment at the book and characterised Herbert as unintellectual and vaguely insipid. Comparisons to Jane Austen in the 1988 edition, based on the similarity of their social milieux, do Herbert no favours. Inadequately educated, hysterically romantic, and limited in expectations, Herbert emerges only as a victim of a society which Austen understood and defined.