Elizabeth Mathew is remembered chiefly as the wife of John Dillon, a leading advocate of the Irish cause for Home Rule at Westminister for nearly 40 years. However, her diary is a testament of her own unique unfolding as a spirited young woman, as a member of a family of distinguished pedigree and as an Irish Catholic living in England. Her diary portrays both a public world that has vanished and a private self that endures. Furthermore, while displaying an acute political consciousness, the light shed on an upper middle-class family in late-Victorian England is vibrant social history. This book has been meticulously edited from an estimated 800,000 words in her 38 journals, preserved among the Dillon papers in Trinity College Dublin by Irish Times journalist and historian, Brendan O Cathaoir.