This thesis focuses on the novels written and published by expatriate Irish women resident in Britain between the years 1890 and 1916, concentrating particularly on the ways in which their texts engaged in the dialogue and participated in the debates surrounding events of import to the political relationship between Britain and Ireland from the downfall of Charles Stewart Parnell to the Easter Rising. The poet William Butler Yeats defined this era as the 'long gestation' of Ireland's violent struggle towards independence from Britain, and it is to the works of Yeats and his Revivalist cohort that critical attention has overwhelmingly turned in assessments of the role that Irish literature played in the politics of the period. The practice of privileging Revivalist texts has tended to occlude the contribution of Irish writers whose work was extrinsic to that movement, and has most notably obfuscated the participation of novels written by Irish women. This study seeks to redress the imbalance of scholarly work by taking into account the critically neglected texts of a group of Irish women writers who were living and working in Britain during the period, and were thus placed in the complex cultural locus between 'Irish' and 'English'. The work of six authors - Emily Lawless, L. T. Meade, George Egerton, Katherine Cecil Thurston, M. E. Francis and Katharine Tynan - who were producing and publishing texts from just such a cultural location is the focus of this study. Between them, these writers generated nearly 500 novels, almost all of which are now out of print and few of which have received sustained scholarly attention. By excavating biographical details for each of these authors and examining a selection of their works in their relevant historical contexts, this study assesses the extent to which novels written by six Irish migrant women from varying class-based and religious backgrounds communicate the experience of living in- between two cultures and at the centre of the prevailing political and social debates of the era.