Introduction

The salon represented an important example of associational life in the long eighteenth century as a mixed-gender voluntary gathering of social elites. Within the salons, it was women who generally presided over the polite, intellectual conversation that took place within fashionable settings. Originating in seventeenth-century France, the literary salon was subsequently warmly embraced by hostesses in Ireland and Britain. Salons indeed flourished across Britain and Ireland in the long eighteenth century, particularly in the metropolitan cities of London, Dublin, and Edinburgh, but also in provincial areas. These salons offered extensive networks of intellectual affiliation and the participants certainly held cosmopolitan ambitions, with cultural links between the salons maintained through travel and epistolary communication. This book offers the first detailed examination of the literary salon in Ireland, considered in the wider contexts of contemporary salon culture in Britain and France. Accordingly, it provides a fresh comparative approach to the salon’s evolution across three countries and reveals the cultural transfers that took place between them.