Cork botanist inspires new book

A fictionalised account has been published of the life of Ireland’s first female botanist who catalogued thousands of species of seaweed and plants in Bantry Bay.

Marianne Lee uses Ellen Hutchins as her inspiration in her debut novel 'A Quiet Tide'.

The book is heavily informed by the archive of letters and documents available to the author via Ellen's descendants and the National Library.

Ellen was pioneering in her botanical research often risking life and limb to collect rare samples and discovered many plants and species featured in botanical archives around the world, that still bear her name.

She was Ireland's first female botanist and dedicated her life to her career in a time when women were defined primarily as mothers, daughters or wives.

Marianne Lee fuses fact with fiction to imagine Ellen’s rich but tormented inner life, repressed by the gender and class confines of her time.

Unmarried, childless and sickly, Ellen is considered an ‘unsuccessful’ woman, dutifully bound to her family’s once grand and isolated estate, Ballylickey House.

She glimpses a happiness and autonomy she can never quite articulate as she reaches for meaning and expression, until the eruption of a long-simmering family feud and the rise of Ellen’s own darkness - her ‘quiet tide’ – will conspire to destroy her fragile future.

Marianne Lee lives in Dublin but hails from Tullamore and travelled regularly to Cork while researching the book. The book is out now.