Historian and literary scholar Nesca Adeline Robb (1905–1976) is perhaps best known for her two-volume biography of William of Orange published in the 1960s. She was born to a well-to-do Belfast Protestant family and educated at Oxford, which awarded her a doctorate in 1932. She subsequently taught in Cambridge and London until 1940, when she became an advisory officer for the Women’s Employment Federation. It was during this time that Robb wrote an impressionistic and highly literate account of her experiences in England, graphically evoking the ‘strange, marooned kind of life’ that war had engendered, while also bringing a supple intelligence and Christian humanist perspective to bear on such topics as the rise of fascism and the role of universities in the reconstruction of post-war Britain. Robb’s work for the Federation also made her keenly aware of women’s lack of fair employment rights and opportunities, imbuing her narrative with a note of feminist protest. In her foreword she explains that the book ‘has something of the character of a long, rambling letter to the people at home’, while also being ‘a tribute of deep, if not wholly uncritical, affection for the country in which I have now spent many years of my life’. This duality of emphasis and perspective reflects the complex set of identities that her narrative negotiates. Although her succinct self-description suggests an unequivocal Britishness — ‘I was born a little Unionist; bred royalist and loyalist from the start’ — Robb also acknowledges an affinity for Ireland and a ‘sense of kinship with the rest of its inhabitants’. Migration further complicated her affiliations.