Charlotte Brooke (Rantavan, Co. Cavan c.1740 – Longford 1793), daughter of the Enlightenment playwright and author Henry Brooke (1703–1783), was of Protestant “Anglo-Irish” stock. Educated by her father, and with a keen interest in history and literature, she was part of the first generation of that Anglo-Irish settler class who took a positive interest in the Irish language and Gaelic antiquity; her initial interest in Irish language and literature was sparked by hearing it spoken and recited by the labourers on the family’s estate. Her first publication was a translation of a poem by the Irish wandering poet Carolan; it appeared in Historical memoirs of the Irish bards (1786), by the antiquarian Joseph Cooper Walker, who remained a lifelong friend.

Brooke, who appears to have been of a frail physique and a timid and retiring disposition, took care of her father after the death of her mother in 1773. Her fame rests on the edited collection of Reliques of Irish Poetry (1789), in the preparation and annotation of which she was assisted by Walker and by native Gaelic antiquarians like Theophilus O’Flanagan. Its scope followed that of the Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765) of Bishop Percy (with whom she corresponded); it fulfilled a crucial role in extricating ancient Irish literature from the speculation and obfuscation following James Macpherson’s Ossianic forgeries. Brooke’s translations used the sentimental and sublime verse style of the day, but the authenticity of her material (which ranged from Ossianic material to more recent, 17th-century poems) was pointedly demonstrated by the inclusion of the original texts. Appended to the end is a sample of Brooke’s own poetic efforts, based on old Gaelic themes. The main aim of the collection is patriotic: to vindicate the merit of native poetry, to present a fund of literary inspiration to Ireland’s literature, and to claim a place for the Gaelic tradition in contemporary British letters.

Brooke had contacts with the patriot-minded antiquarians around Walker who founded the Royal Irish Academy in Dublin in 1786; as a woman, however, she was not allowed to associate herself with it, even in a menial salaried position which she requested under the pressure of financial hardship. She eventually retired to a country house near the estate where she had been born and died there in 1793.

Brooke’s Reliques, which were reissued in 1816, bridged the incisive 1798 rebellion and 1801 Act of Union, which marked the demise of Enlightenment Patriotism and of antiquarianism in Ireland. Her book had originally intensified the newly-emerging cultural identification of the ruling Anglo-Irish class with Ireland rather than England (among the subscribers figure many of the leading “Patriotic” names in Anglo-Irish learned and political circles); subsequently, radical nationalists such as the United Irishmen took up a cultural Gaelicism indebted to the Reliques. And throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, the Reliques remained a benchmark: bilingual anthologies of older Irish literature, from James Hardiman’s Irish Minstrelsy (1831) onwards, at each stage confirmed Brooke’s pioneering status and influence.