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Death of William Congreve, Playwright & Poet

William Congreve, English playwright, satirist and poet, dies at his home in Surrey Street, London, on January 19, 1729.

Congreve is born on January 24, 1670, at Bardsley, West Yorkshire, England, the son of William Congreve, an army officer, and Mary Browning of Doncaster. In 1674, his father gains a commission as lieutenant in the army in Ireland, and moves with his family to the garrison port of Youghal, County Cork, where they remain until 1678. After a brief period at Carrickfergus, they move in 1681 to Kilkenny, where his father is assigned to the Duke of Ormond‘s regiment. This service entitles Congreve to a free education at the renowned Kilkenny College, where Jonathan Swift is also a student, and where he receives an excellent schooling in classics. He forms a lasting friendship with another pupil, Joseph Kelly, a lawyer and MP for Doneraile (1705–13), with whom he later maintains a lengthy correspondence. In April 1686, he enters Trinity College Dublin (TCD) as a classical scholar and, again like Swift, is taught by St. George Ashe. It seems likely that his degree is disrupted by the political upheaval of 1688 as the college is forced to close in 1689 and his BA is not recorded.

At this point, Congreve leaves Ireland and spends the spring and summer of 1689 with relatives in Staffordshire. He subsequently moves to London, and in March 1691 enters the Middle Temple. He is not assiduous in his legal studies, preferring to socialise with intellectuals and writers, notably John Dryden, to pursue literary projects. In 1692, under the pseudonym “Cleophil,” he published Incognita, or, Love and Duty Reconciled, a romantic novella reputedly written while he is a student in Dublin. He also contributes some verse to Charles Gildon‘s Miscellany (1692), as well as two translations from Homer and three odes to Dryden’s Examen poeticum (1693). Dryden evidently thinks highly of the young writer, and with his advice and approbation Congreve’s first play, The Old Batchelor, is recommended by the Irish playwright Thomas Southerne to Thomas Davenant, manager of the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. A fast-paced and witty comedy, concerning amorous appetites, The Old Batchelor is accepted and opens on March 9, 1693, to popular acclaim, enjoying an unusually long run of fourteen nights. Among the cast are Thomas Doggett, still relatively unknown, as Fondlewife, and a young English actress and singer, Anne Bracegirdle as Amarinta, with whom Congreve falls in love and begins a prolonged relationship. The play is dedicated to his friend Charles Boyle, eldest son of Richard Boyle, 1st Earl of Burlington, whose estates Congreve’s father had begun to manage in 1690.

After this early success, Congreve is dismayed by the poor reception of his next play, a domestic comedy with dark undertones entitled The Double Dealer, which is staged in December 1693 and criticised as immoral and unflattering in its representation of women. Its popularity improves somewhat when Mary II, Queen of England, soon after its undistinguished debut, commands a performance. When the queen dies the following year, Congreve eulogises her in The Mourning Muse of Alexis, a Pastoral. Regarded by contemporaries as his finest literary work, it is rewarded by a gift of £100 from King William III. Production of his next play is delayed by the revolt of the Drury Lane actors against the management of Christopher Rich. Congreve supports the actors and their petition to the Lord Chamberlain to reopen the theatre at Lincoln’s Inn Fields. When their request is granted, the renovated theatre opens on April 30, 1695, with Congreve’s enduring romantic comedy Love for Love, and the playwright being made a shareholder in the new company. A characteristically witty and well-plotted comedy, the production of Love for Love is particularly notable for Doggett’s sparkling performance as Sailor Ben. Congreve’s dramatic success also brings political advancement, as he receives his first government appointment as commissioner for hackney coaches.

Congreve returns to Ireland for most of 1696, where, with Southerne, he receives an MA from TCD, and probably visits his parents, then living at Lismore Castle, County Waterford. He also begins work on a tragedy entitled The Mourning Bride, which becomes an instant hit at Lincoln’s Inn Fields when it is first performed in February 1697 and running for thirteen nights. Despite his considerable success and popularity, he is deeply disconcerted by Jeremy Collier‘s aggressively anti-theatrical pamphlet, Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage (1698), which targets John Vanbrugh, Dryden, and Congreve. He is stung into a response, publishing Amendments of Mr. Collier’s False and Imperfect Citations (1698), which eloquently defends his dramatic methodology, but is rendered less effective by an emotional and ill-judged tone. His theatrical acumen seems to be at odds with the times, for in the dedication to his next play, The Way of the World, he observes that “little of it was prepar’d for that general taste which seems now to be predominant in the pallats of our audience.” Nevertheless, he is still bitterly disappointed by the disparaging response to its first performance on March 12, 1700. Dryden, however, realises the merit of the play, which is now recognised as Congreve’s masterpiece and a landmark in the dramatic tradition of the comedy of manners.

Disheartened, Congreve abandons play-writing, but he maintains his theatrical connections and embarks upon several collateral projects, producing a libretto for The Judgement of Paris (1701), and collaborating with Vanbrugh and the poet William Walsh on a translation of Molière‘s Monsieur de Pourceaugnac, staged as Squire Trelooby at the Lincoln’s Inn Fields theatre in 1704. Less successfully, he makes an ill-advised investment with Vanbrugh in a new theatre and opera house in the Haymarket, from which he withdraws with financial losses in 1705. His opera libretto Semele, written for the opening of the new theatre, is not performed until 1744, when it is scored by George Frideric Handel, though John Eccles writes a score in 1707 which remains unperformed until 1972. In the early 1700s his relationship with Anne Bracegirdle falters, though they remain lifelong friends.

In 1710, Congreve publishes The Works of Mr. William Congreve in three volumes. He continues throughout his life to write poetry, ballads, essays, and other miscellaneous pieces. He remains active and influential in literary and theatrical circles, often assisting young writers such as Charles Hopkins, son of Ezekiel Hopkins, Bishop of Derry, and Alexander Pope, who dedicates to him The Iliad (1715). Financially, however, he becomes increasingly dependent upon various minor government posts. He belongs for many years to the celebrated Kit-Cat Club, alongside such prominent writers, wits, and whigs as Richard Boyle, 2nd Earl of Cork, Richard Steele, Joseph Addison, Walsh, and Vanbrugh. Through the good offices of his friend Jonathan Swift, he retains his government position as Commissioner of Wines during the Tory administration of 1710–14. His party loyalty is rewarded in 1714 when he receives a lucrative government appointment as Secretary of the island of Jamaica. His personal life also improves around this time, as a friendship with Lady Henrietta Godolphin develops into a love affair that lasts for the rest of his life. They have one daughter, Mary (1723–64).

Congreve suffers for much of his life from gout and failing eyesight. These afflictions worsen with age, though friends remark that his cheerful temper survived unaffected. He is involved in a coach accident in September 1728, and dies January 19, 1729, at his home in Surrey Street, likely from a related injury. He names Francis Godolphin, 2nd Earl of Godolphin, his lover’s husband, as his executor, and bequeaths almost his entire estate to Henrietta, thereby discreetly leaving his property to his daughter. He is buried in Poet’s Corner, Westminster Abbey, on January 26.

Letters and manuscripts of Congreve are held in the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford, the British Library, London, and the National Archives of Scotland. Several likenesses are in the National Portrait Gallery, London, including the portrait in oils shown above by Sir Godfrey Kneller (1709).

(From: “Congreve, William” by Sinéad Sturgeon, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009; Pictured: Portrait of William Congreve (1709) by Sir Godfrey Kneller)


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Death of Gerard Slevin, Heraldist & Dramatist

(John) Gerard Slevin, dramatist and Chief Herald of Ireland from 1954 to 1981, dies on January 18, 1997.

Slevin is born on November 1, 1919, in Cork, County Cork, the son of John Slevin, motor mechanic, of Wellington Road, Cork, and Bridget Slevin (née Kennelly). His father, who hails from County Laois tenant farmers, works with the Irish Omnibus Corporation. He is educated at North Monastery CBS and University College Cork (UCC), taking an MA summa cum laude in philosophy and English in 1941.

After lecturing at St. Patrick’s College, Dublin, from 1941 to 1944, Slevin enters the civil service. Despite no prior interest in heraldry, he is selected via competition to assist the newly installed Chief Herald, Dr. Edward MacLysaght, in the genealogical office, Bedford Tower, Dublin Castle. After serving as Deputy Chief Herald (1944–54), he succeeds MacLysaght as Chief Herald of Ireland, becoming the longest-serving occupant of the office (1954–81).

One of three national heralds named to a vexillogical committee to devise a common emblem for the Council of Europe, Slevin persuades his colleagues to eschew religious iconography, such as the Christian cross, as inappropriate. His own design of a circle of twelve golden stars on an azure field is selected by the committee in 1954, and formally accepted by the council in December 1955. With blue chosen as a colour common to the flags of many European countries, the twelve stars represent not individual states but such associations as the zodiac and a clock face, suggesting ideals of universality, harmony, and evolution through time. Adopted in 1985 for the flag of the European Community (latterly the European Union), his design attracts wide acclaim in heraldic circles, leading to his being awarded membership of the Académie Internationale d’Héraldique.

During Slevin’s tenure as Chief Herald, several hundred patents of arms are issued to Irish public bodies, including civic and municipal authorities, and to individuals of Irish descent worldwide. On behalf of the Irish government, he confirms the Irish connections of such notables as United States presidents Kennedy, Nixon, and Reagan, French president Charles de Gaulle, and Princess Grace of Monaco. His coat of arms for President Kennedy, combining the ancient arms of the Kennedy and Fitzgerald families, wins renown as a masterpiece of heraldic design. While possessing a keen sense of graphic impact, he is not a great draughtsman, and he employs the noted heraldic painter Myra Maguire to execute the designs that he creates. He oversees expansion of genealogical office services, instituting an advisory service and team of research assistants for the growing numbers – especially within emigrant communities abroad – seeking to trace Irish ancestry. He establishes a committee to catalogue churchyard memorial inscriptions as an archival resource, meant to redress the loss of state records in the 1922 Four Courts fire.

Slevin wins first prize in successive years in the 1950s for entries in the Oireachteas drama competition, both plays being subsequently produced at the Abbey Theatre. He writes a detective novel in Irish, and contributes numerous articles to learned journals, chiefly on medieval heraldry and Anglo-Irish families. Erudite and possessed of great presence, courtesy, and wit, he is an engaging speaker.

Resident in south County Dublin, Slevin is active in amateur dramatics, local history societies, and the ecumenical movement. His recreation is long country walks. He marries Millicent Nolan in 1950 and they have three sons. He dies on January 18, 1997.

(From: “Slevin, (John) Gerard” by Lawrence William White, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009 (last revised February 2025))


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Death of Dorothy Macardle, Writer, Playwright, Journalist

Dorothy Macardle, Irish writer, novelist, playwright, journalist and non-academic historian, dies in Drogheda, County Louth, on December 23, 1958. Associated throughout her life with Irish republicanism, she is a founding member of Fianna Fáil in 1926 and is considered to be closely aligned with Éamon de Valera until her death, although she is vocal critic of how women are represented in the 1937 constitution created by Fianna Fáil. She is also unable to respect de Valera’s attitudes adopted during World War II. Her book, The Irish Republic, is one of the more frequently cited narrative accounts of the Irish War of Independence and its aftermath, particularly for its exposition of the anti-treaty viewpoint.

Macardle is born in Dundalk, County Louth, on March 7, 1889, into a wealthy brewing family famous for producing Macardle’s Ale. Her father, Sir Thomas Callan Macardle, is a Catholic who supports John Redmond and the Irish Home Rule movement, while her mother, Lucy “Minnie” Macardle, comes from an English Anglican background and is politically a unionist. Lucy converts to Catholicism upon her marriage to Thomas. Macardle and her siblings are raised as Catholics, but Lucy, who is politically isolated in Ireland, “inculcated in her children an idealised view of England and an enthusiasm for the British empire“. She receives her secondary education in Alexandra College, Dublin—a school under the management of the Church of Ireland—and later attends University College Dublin (UCD). Upon graduating, she returns to teach English at Alexandra where she had first encountered Irish nationalism as a student. This is further developed by her first experiences of Dublin’s slums, which “convinced her that an autonomous Ireland might be better able to look after its own affairs” than the Dublin Castle administration could.

Between 1914 and 1916, Macardle lives and works in Stratford-upon-Avon in Warwickshire, England. There, her encounters with upper-class English people who express anti-Irish sentiment and support keeping Ireland in the British Empire by force further weakens her Anglophilia. Upon the outbreak of World War I, she supports the Allies, as does the rest of her family. Her father leads the County Louth recruiting committee while two of her brothers volunteer for the British Army. Her brother, Lieutenant Kenneth Callan Macardle, is killed at the Battle of the Somme, while another brother, Major John Ross Macardle, survives the war and earns the Military Cross. While Macardle is a student, the Easter Rising occurs, an experience credited for a further divergence of her views regarding republicanism and her family.

Macardle is a member of the Gaelic League and later joins both Sinn Féin and Cumann na mBan in 1917. In 1918, she is arrested by the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) while teaching at Alexandra.

On January 19, 1919, Macardle is in the public gallery for the inaugural meeting of the First Dáil and witnesses it declare unilateral independence from the United Kingdom, which is ultimately the catalyst for the Irish War of Independence.

By 1919 Macardle has befriended Maud Gonne MacBride, the widow of the 1916 Easter Rising participant John MacBride, and together the two work at the Irish White Cross, attending to those injured in the war. It is during this period she also becomes a propagandist for the nationalist side.

In December 1920, Macardle travel to London to meet with Margot Asquith, the wife of the former British prime minister H. H. Asquith, hoping to establish a line of communication between the Irish and British governments. It is during this trip that she comes into contact with Charlotte Despard, sister of the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland John French. Despard takes the pro-Irish side in the war and returns with Macardle to Dublin.

Following the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty in December 1921, Macardle takes the anti-treaty side in the ensuing Irish Civil War. Alongside Gonne MacBride and Despard, she helps found the Women Prisoners’ Defence League, which campaigns and advocates for republicans imprisoned by the newly established Irish Free State government. It is also during this same time that she begins working alongside Erskine Childers in writing for anti-treaty publications An Phoblacht and Irish Freedom.

In October 1922, Despard, Gonne MacBride and Macardle are speaking at a protest on O’Connell Street, Dublin against the arrest of Mary MacSwiney, a sitting Teachta Dála, by the Free State when Free State authorities move to break it up. Rioting follows and Free State forces open fire, resulting in 14 people being seriously wounded while hundreds of others are harmed in the subsequent stampede to flee. Following the event, Macardle announces she is going to pursue support of the Anti-treaty side full-time in a letter to Alexandra College, which ultimately leads to her dismissal on November 15, 1922. In the following days Macardle is captured and imprisoned by the Free State government and subsequently serves time in both Mountjoy Prison and Kilmainham Gaol, with Rosamond Jacob as her cellmate. During one point at her time in Kilmainham, Macardle is beaten unconscious by male wardens. She becomes close friends with Jacob and shares a flat with her in Rathmines later in the 1920s.

The Irish Civil War concludes in the spring of 1923, and Macardle is released from prison on May 9.

Following the Irish Civil War, Macardle remains active in Sinn Féin and is drawn into the camp of its leader Éamon de Valera and his wife Sinéad. She travels alongside the de Valeras as they tour the country and she is a frequent visitor to their home. As the trust between Macardle and de Valera develops, de Valera asks her to travel to County Kerry to investigate and document what later becomes known as the Ballyseedy massacre of March 1923, in which a number of unarmed republican prisoners are reportedly killed in reprisals. She obliges, and by May 1924 she has compiled a report that is released under the title of The Tragedies of Kerry.” Immediately upon the release of the report, the Minister for Defence Richard Mulcahy sets up an inquiry in June 1924 to carry out a separate investigation by the government. However, the government’s inquiry comes to the conclusion there had been no wrongdoing committed. Her book The Tragedies of Kerry remains in print and is the first journalistic historical account of the Irish Civil War from those on the republican side detailing Ballyseedy, Countess Bridge and various other incidents that occur in Kerry during this time.

In 1926, Éamon de Valera resigns as President of Sinn Féin and walks out of the party following a vote against his motion that members of the party should end their policy of abstentionism against Dáil Éireann. De Valera and his supporters, including Macardle, form the new political party Fianna Fáil in May 1926, with Macardle immediately elected to the party’s National Executive|Ard Chomhairle, one of six female members out of twelve on the original party National Executive, the others being Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington, Kathleen Clarke, Countess Constance Markievicz and Linda Kearns. Macardle is made the party’s director of publicity. However, she resigns from Fianna Fáil in 1927 when the new party endorses taking their seats in Dáil Eireann. Nevertheless, her views remain relatively pro-Fianna Fáil and pro-de Valera.

Macardle recounts her civil war experiences in Earthbound: Nine Stories of Ireland (1924). She continues as a playwright for the next two decades. In her dramatic writing, she uses the pseudonym Margaret Callan. In many of her plays a domineering female character is always present. This is thought to be symbolic of her own relationship with her own mother. Her parents’ marriage had broken up as her mother returned to England and her father raised the children with servants in Cambrickville and they were sent away for school. This female character holds back the growth and development of the younger female character in Dorothy’s plays and writings. 

By 1931, Macardle takes up work as a writer for The Irish Press, which is owned by de Valera and leans heavily toward supporting Fianna Fáil and Irish republicanism in general. In addition to being a theatre and literary critic for the paper, she also occasionally writes pieces of investigative journalism such as reports on Dublin’s slums. In the mid-1930s she also becomes a broadcaster for the newly created national radio station Radio Éireann.

In 1937, Macardle writes and publishes the work by which she is best known, The Irish Republic, an in-depth account of the history of Ireland between 1919 until 1923. Because of the book, political opponents and some modern historians consider her to have been a hagiographer toward de Valera’s political views. In 1939 she admits, “I am a propagandist, unrepentant and unashamed.” Overall, however, the book is well-received, with reviews ranging from “glowing” to measured praise. She is widely praised for her research, thorough documentation, range of sources and narration of dramatic events, alongside reservations about the book’s political slant. The book is reprinted several times, most recently in 2005. Éamon de Valera considers The Irish Republic the only authoritative account of the period from 1916 to 1926, and the book is widely used by de Valera and Fianna Fáil over the years and by history and political students. She spends seven years writing the book in a cottage in Delgany, County Wicklow, and it is a day-by-day account of the history of the events in Ireland from 1919 to 1923 recorded in painstaking detail together with voluminous source material.

In 1937, de Valera’s Fianna Fáil government is able to create a new Constitution of Ireland following a successful referendum. However, there is widespread criticism of the new Constitution from women, particularly republican women, as the language of the new Constitution emphasises that a woman’s place should be in the home. Macardle is among them, deploring what she sees as the reduced status of women in this new Constitution. Furthermore, she notes that the new Constitution drops the commitment of the 1916 Proclamation of the Irish Republic to guarantee equal rights and opportunities “without distinction of sex” and writes to de Valera questioning how anyone “with advanced views on the rights of women” can support it. DeValera also finds her criticising compulsory Irish language teaching in schools.

The entire matter of the new Constitution leads Macardle to join Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington’s Women’s Social and Progressive League.

While working as a journalist with the League of Nations in the late 1930s, Macardle acquires a considerable affinity with the plight of Czechoslovakia being pressed to make territorial concessions to Nazi Germany. Believing that “Hitler‘s war should be everybody’s war,” she disagrees with de Valera’s policy of neutrality. She goes to work for the BBC in London, develops her fiction and, in the war’s aftermath, campaigns for refugee children – a crisis described in her book Children of Europe (1949). In 1951, she becomes the first president of the Irish Society of Civil Liberties.

Macardle dies of cancer on December 23, 1958, in a hospital in Drogheda, at the age of 69. Though she is somewhat disillusioned with the new Irish State, she leaves the royalties from The Irish Republic to her close friend Éamon de Valera, who had written the foreword to the book. De Valera visits her when she is dying. She is accorded a state funeral, with de Valera giving the oration. She is buried in Sutton, Dublin.


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Death of Conor Cruise O’Brien, Politician, Writer & Historian

Conor Cruise O’Brien, politician, writer, historian and academic often nicknamed “The Cruiser,” dies in Howth, Dublin, on December 18, 2008.

Cruise O’Brien is born in Rathmines, Dublin on November 3, 1917. He serves as Minister for Posts and Telegraphs from 1973 to 1977, a Senator for Dublin University from 1977 to 1979, a Teachta Dála (TD) for the Dublin North-East constituency from 1969 to 1977 and a Member of the European Parliament (MEP) from January 1973 to March 1973.

Cruise O’Brien follows his cousin Owen into Sandford Park School, which has a predominantly Protestant ethos despite objections from Catholic clergy. He subsequently attends Trinity College Dublin (TCD) before joining the Irish diplomatic corps.

Although he is a fierce advocate of his homeland, Cruise O’Brien is a strong critic of Irish Republican Army (IRA) violence and of what he considers the romanticized desire for reunification with Northern Ireland. His collection of essays Maria Cross: Imaginative Patterns in a Group of Modern Catholic Writers (1952; written under the pseudonym Donat O’Donnell) impresses UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld, who in 1961 appoints him UN special representative in the Congo, later the Democratic Republic of the Congo. He orders UN peacekeeping forces into the breakaway Katanga province, and the resulting scandal forces him out of office. Despite UN objections, he writes To Katanga and Back (1963) to explain his actions.

After serving as vice-chancellor of the University of Ghana (1962–65) and Albert Schweitzer Professor of Humanities at New York University (1965–69), Cruise O’Brien enters Irish politics. He holds a Labour Party seat in Dáil Éireann from 1969 to 1977 and then in the Senate from 1977 to 1979, representing Trinity College, of which he is pro-chancellor (1973–2008).

In 1979, Cruise O’Brien is named editor in chief of the British Sunday newspaper The Observer, but he leaves after three tumultuous years. He remains an active newspaper columnist, especially for the Irish Independent until 2007. His books include States of Ireland (1972) and On the Eve of the Millennium (1995), as well as perceptive studies of Charles Stewart Parnell, Edmund Burke, and Thomas Jefferson.

In early July 1996, in the period of Cruise O’Brien’s involvement as a UK Unionist Party (UKUP) representative in talks at Stormont, he suffers a mild stroke. He recovers well, but is left with anxiety about his recall of names. His last public appearance is on September 7, 2006, to deliver an address on the ninetieth anniversary of the death of Tom Kettle, in the old House of Lords chamber of the Bank of Ireland on College Green.

Cruise O’Brien dies at the age of 91 on December 18, 2008, in Howth, Dublin. His funeral is at the Church of the Assumption, Howth, and he is interred in Glasnevin Cemetery.


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Birth of Novelist John Banville

William John Banville, novelist, short story writer, adapter of dramas, and screenwriter, is born in Wexford, County Wexford, on December 8, 1945. He also has a 30-year career working in the Irish newspaper industry and serves as literary editor of The Irish Times from 1988 until 1999.

Banville is born to Agnes (née Doran) and Martin Banville, a garage clerk, in Wexford. He is the youngest of three siblings. He is educated at CBS Primary, Wexford, a Christian Brothers school, and at St. Peter’s College, Wexford. Despite having intentions of being a painter and an architect, he does not attend university. After school, he works as a clerk at Aer Lingus, which allows him to travel at deeply discounted rates. He takes advantage of these rates to travel to Greece and Italy. He begins working as a sub-editor at The Irish Press in 1969.

Banville publishes his first book, a collection of short stories titled Long Lankin, in 1970. His first novel, Nightspawn, appears in 1971, followed by his second, Birchwood, two years later. His The Revolutions Trilogy, published between 1976 and 1982, comprises works named after renowned scientists: Doctor Copernicus, Kepler and The Newton Letter. His next work, Mefisto, has a mathematical theme, and, in combination with the three books from The Revolutions Trilogy, is the fourth book from the “Scientific Tetralogy.” His 1989 novel, The Book of Evidence, begins The Frames Trilogy, dealing with the work of art. It is completed by Ghosts and Athena. His thirteenth novel, The Sea, wins the Booker Prize in 2005. In addition, he publishes crime novels as Benjamin Black, most of which feature the character of Quirke, an Irish pathologist based in 1950s Dublin. His alternative history novel, The Secret Guests (2020), is published under the name B. W. Black.

Banville wins the 1976 James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the 2003 International Nonino Prize, the 2005 Booker Prize, the 2011 Franz Kafka Prize, the 2013 Austrian State Prize for European Literature and the 2014 Prince of Asturias Award for Literature. He is elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2007. Italy makes him a Cavaliere of the Ordine della Stella d’Italia (a knighthood) in 2017. He is a former member of Aosdána, having voluntarily relinquished the financial stipend in 2001 to another, more impoverished, writer. He is considered a contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

In 1969, Banville marries the American textile artist Janet Dunham, whom he met in San Francisco the previous year while she is a student at the University of California, Berkeley. The couple has two sons together. The marriage breaks down after Banville has an affair with a neighbour, Patricia Quinn, who subsequently becomes director of the Arts Council of Ireland. Banville has two daughters with Quinn, born around 1990 and 1997. Despite separating, Banville and Dunham never divorce and he describes them as remaining “on good terms.” Dunham dies at Blackrock Clinic on November 22, 2021, after which Banville states that he experienced “brain fog” due to grief and is unable to write for six months. In a 2024 interview, he expresses regret over his relationship history, saying, “I caused Janet such anguish. I have caused Patricia Quinn such anguish. I wasn’t good with my children. I was not a good parent. I am not a good person. I am selfish. But I have to have responsibility.”

Banville currently lives in Howth, Dublin.


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Birth of Mary Leadbeater, Irish Quaker Author & Diarist

Mary Leadbeater (née Shackleton), Irish Quaker author and diarist, is born in the planned Quaker settlement of Ballitore, County Kildare, on December 1, 1758. She writes and publishes extensively on both secular and religious topics ranging from translation, poetry, letters, children’s literature and biography. Her accounts of the Irish Rebellion of 1798 provide an insight into the effects of the Rebellion on the community in Ballitore.

Shackleton is the daughter of Richard Shackleton (1726–92) by his second wife, Elizabeth Carleton (1726–66), and granddaughter of Abraham Shackleton, schoolmaster of Edmund Burke. Her parents are Quakers. She keeps a personal diary for most of her life, beginning at the age of eleven and writing in it almost daily. There 55 extant volumes of her diaries in the National Library of Ireland.

Shackleton is educated, and her literary studies are aided by Aldborough Wrightson, a man who had been educated at Ballitore school and had returned to die there. In 1784, she travels to London with her father and pays several visits to Burke’s town house, where she meets Sir Joshua Reynolds and George Crabbe. She also goes to Beaconsfield, and on her return writes a poem in praise of the place and its owner, which is acknowledged by Burke on December 13, 1784, in a long letter. On her way home she visits, at Selby, North Yorkshire, some primitive Quakers whom she describes in her journal.

On January 6, 1791, Shackleton marries William Leadbeater, a former pupil of her father and a descendent of the Huguenot Le Batre and Gilliard families. He becomes a prosperous farmer and landowner in Ballitore. She spends many years working in the village post office and also works as a bonnet-maker and a herbal healer for the village. The couple lives in Ballitore and have six children. Their daughter Jane dies at a young age from injuries sustained after an accident with a wax taper. Another daughter, Lydia, is a friend and possible patron of the poet and novelist Gerald Griffin.

On her father’s death in 1792, Leadbeater receives a letter of consolation from Burke. Besides receiving letters from Burke, she corresponds with, among others, Maria Edgeworth, George Crabbe, and Melesina Trench. On May 28, 1797, Burke writes one of his last letters to her.

Leadbeater describes in detail the effects of the Irish Rebellion of 1798 on the lives of her family and neighbours in Ballitore. She is in Carlow on Christmas Day 1796 attending a Quaker meeting when the news arrives that the French fleet has been seen off Bantry. She describes the troops marching out of the town and the ensuing confusion in Carlow and Ballitore.

Leadbeater’s first literary work, Extracts and Original Anecdotes for the Improvement of Youth, is published anonymously in 1794 in Dublin. It contains an account of the history of Quakerism and several poems on secular and religious subjects.

In 1808, Leadbeater publishes Poems with a metrical version of her husband’s prose translation of Maffeo Vegio‘s Thirteenth Book of the Æneid. She next publishes in 1811 Cottage Dialogues among the Irish Peasantry, of which four editions, with some alterations and additions, appear by 1813. In 1813, she tries to instruct the rich on a similar plan in The Landlord’s Friend. Intended as a sequel to Cottage Dialogues, in which persons of quality are made to discourse on such topics as beggars, spinning-wheels, and Sunday in the village, Tales for Cottagers, which she brings out in 1814 in conjunction with Elizabeth Shackleton, is a return to the original design. The tales illustrate perseverance, temper, economy, and are followed by a moral play, Honesty is the Best Policy.

In 1822, Leadbeater concludes this series with Cottage Biography, being a Collection of Lives of the Irish Peasantry. The lives are those of real persons, and contain some interesting passages, especially in the life of James Dunn, a pilgrim to Lough Derg. Many traits of Irish country life appear in these books, and they preserve several of the idioms of the English-speaking inhabitants of the Pale. Memoirs and Letters of Richard and Elizabeth Shackleton … compiled by their Daughter is also issued in 1822. Her Biographical Notices of Members of the Society of Friends who were resident in Ireland appears in 1823, and is a summary of their spiritual lives, with a scanty narrative of events. Her last work is The Pedlars, a Tale, published in 1824.

Leadbeater’s best known work, the Annals of Ballitore, is not printed until 1862, when it is brought out with the general title of The Leadbeater Papers (2 vols.) by Richard Davis Webb, a printer who wants to preserve a description on rural Irish life. It tells of the inhabitants and events of Ballitore from 1766 to 1823, and few books give a better idea of the character and feelings of Irish cottagers, of the premonitory signs of the rebellion of 1798, and the Rebellion itself. The second volume includes unpublished letters of Burke and the correspondence with Mrs. Richard Trench and with Crabbe.

Leadbeater dies at Ballitore on June 27, 1826, and is buried in the Quaker burial-ground there.


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Birth of Derek Mahon, Northern Irish Poet

Norman Derek Mahon, Irish poet, is born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, on November 23, 1941, but lives in a number of cities around the world. At his death it is noted that his “influence in the Irish poetry community, literary world and society at large, and his legacy, is immense.” President of Ireland Michael D. Higgins says of Mahon, “he shared with his northern peers the capacity to link the classical and the contemporary but he brought also an edge that was unsparing of cruelty and wickedness.”

Mahon is the only child of Ulster Protestant working class parents. His father and grandfather work at Harland and Wolff while his mother works at a local flax mill. During his childhood, he claims he is something of a solitary dreamer, comfortable with his own company yet aware of the world around him. Interested in literature from an early age, he attends Skegoneill Primary School and then the Royal Belfast Academical Institution, known locally as Inst.

At Inst Mahon encounters fellow students who share his interest in literature and poetry. The school produces a magazine in which he produces some of his early poems. According to the critic Hugh Haughton, his early poems are highly fluent and extraordinary for a person so young. His parents cannot see the point of poetry, but he sets out to prove them wrong after he wins his school’s Forrest Reid Memorial Prize for the poem ”The power that gives the water breath.”

Mahon pursues third level studies at Trinity College Dublin (TCD) in French, English, and Philosophy and where he edits Icarus, and forms many friendships with writers such as Michael Longley, Eavan Boland and Brendan Kennelly. He starts to mature as a poet. He leaves TCD in 1965 to take up studies at the Sorbonne in Paris.

After leaving the Sorbonne in 1966, Mahon works his way through Canada and the United States. In 1968, while spending a year teaching English at Belfast High School, he publishes his first collection of poems, Night Crossing (1968, Oxford University Press). He later teaches in a school in Dublin and works in London as a freelance journalist. He lives in Kinsale, County Cork. On March 23, 2007, he is awarded the David Cohen Prize for Literature. He wins the Poetry Now Award in 2006 for his collection, Harbour Lights, and again in 2009 for his Life on Earth collection.

At times expressing anti-establishment values, Mahon describes himself as an “aesthete” with a penchant “for left-wingery […] to which, perhaps naively, I adhere.”

In March 2020, at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, RTÉ News ends its evening broadcast with Mahon reading his poem Everything Is Going to Be All Right.

Mahon dies in Cork, County Cork, on October 1, 2020, after a short illness, aged 78. He is survived by his partner, Sarah Iremonger, and his three children, Rory, Katy, and Maisie. His papers are held at Emory University.

Mahon features on the Irish Leaving Certificate course with ten of his poems (Grandfather, Day Trip to Donegal, Ecclesiastes, After the Titanic, As It Should Be, A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford, Rathlin, The Chinese Restaurant in Portrush, Kinsale and Antarctica)


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George Bernard Shaw Refuses Nobel Prize Money

On November 18, 1926, George Bernard Shaw refuses to accept the Nobel Prize in Literature prize money of £7,000 awarded to him a year earlier. He says, “I can forgive Alfred Nobel for his invention of the explosive but only the devil can think of the Nobel Prize.”

Shaw is born in Dublin on July 26, 1856, the third child of George Carr Shaw, a civil servant who later turns to a failed grain business to become an alcoholic, and Lucinda Elizabeth Shaw, a professional singer and sister of the famous opera singer Lucinda Frances. He is initially poor but is gifted with music and soon understands and loves the work of famous musicians and learns more about painting in Dublin. At the age of 15, he works as an apprentice and cashier for a real estate firm.

In 1876, Shaw follows his mother and two sisters to London. There he writes music reviews for newspapers to earn money, self-studies and actively participates in social activities. In 1884, he joins the founding of Fabian Society, an organization of British intellectuals advocating transition from capitalism to socialism by way of peace. From 1879 to 1883, he writes his first novel, Immaturity, and five other works that are not printed. An Unsocial Socialist is the first novel to be printed in 1887. Considered the father of “conceptual drama,” he begins writing plays in 1885, but achieves initial fame with Widowers’ Houses (1892). By 1903, his drama takes over the American and German stage, and in 1904 dominates the domestic stage. He becomes even more famous when Edward VII, the King of England, attends the performance of John Bull’s Other Island (1904), after which his drama spreads to European countries.

In addition, Shaw is also considered the best playwright in Britain at the time. He wants to use art to awaken people first to require changing the bourgeoisie order with all its institutions and customs. He emphasizes the educational function of the theater, but seeing the function of education is not an imposition from the playwright but arousing the aesthetic needs of the audience. The harsh problems of contemporary society such as the island’s predominant power, exploitative patterns, and the poverty of the people lead to social evils clearly reflected in his drama. His drama style tends to be satirical, sarcastic, finding its way to truth through paradoxes.

Shaw’s youngest dream is to earn a sum of money, then marry a wealthy wife. However, before becoming so wealthy that he can spend $ 35,000 on charity and enough money to travel around the world, he goes through many years of hardship. In the first nine years of his career, he receives only $30 USD in royalties. He is so poor that he does not even have the toll to get his manuscript to publishers. His clothes are tattered, his shoes open. All of his spending comes from his mother’s allowance. When he gets his name and remembers the miserable days, he often frowns, “I should have supported my family, the results are the opposite. I have never done anything for my family, and my mother has to work, raising me even though I was an adult.” Shaw, however, decides not to give up writing.

Realizing that, Shaw looks at the real royalties by publishing novels and the journey to the desired destination seems far away. He then turns to writing plays. He calculates that if the script is made public, the author will have revenue through the number of tickets issued and the number of shows. At the same time, the name of the author is also quickly known to the public. On the other hand, he says, only theater can “awaken people before the change of modern social order with all its institutions and customs.” He also judges that in addition to entertainment functions, the drama also contains the function of education, through arousing the aesthetic needs of the audience. He does not hesitate to bring to the stage all the most pressing issues of contemporary society such as the money’s inertia, the poverty of the people, and the social evils.

Saint Joan (1923) is judged to be the culmination of Shaw’s writing career. It is performed throughout European stages and is very popular. Two years after the release of Saint Joan, he is awarded the Nobel Prize for “the ideological and highly humanistic compositions, especially the spectacular satirical plays, combined with looks. Strange beauty of poetry.” When notified of his winning of the Nobel Prize, he humorously says, “The Nobel Prize for literature is like a float thrown to a swimmer.” Although he thinks he is the “swimmer to the shore,” he never leaves the pen. Thirteen years after receiving the Nobel Prize, Pygmalion, a script he wrote in 1912, is made into a film and receives the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay.

In terms of scenario remuneration, Shaw receives an average of $100,000 a year, enough to spend on life, “reproduce” writing and traveling. It is only possible to marry a wealthy wife until the age of 40 years old. He always thinks that he “has no marriage status because he always worries others.” In terms of form, he is not very attractive because of his skinny body, but watching as the sisters do not allow him to carry out his intention to preserve his “absolute freedom.” Many beautiful female actors actively proclaim marriage proposal to Shaw, but he always uses humorous sentences to refuse.

Describing the George Bernard Shaw, Albert Einstein‘s physical genius after having met him has to say, “There are rare people who are so independent that they can see the weaknesses and absurdities of contemporaries. and at the same time do not let me get into it, but even so, when I encounter the hardships of life, these lonely people often lose their courage in helping humanity, with subtle humor and gentleness, can enthrall contemporaries and deserve to be torchbearers on the way of art’s unfavorable ways, today, with a passionate affection, I salute celebrate the biggest teacher on that path – the one who taught us and made us all feel happy.” It is a rare meeting of two great people in London in the fall of 1930.

(From: “November 18, 1926 – George Bernard Shaw refuses to receive a Nobel prize,” ScienceInfo.net, updated December 17, 2018)


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Birth of Liam Ó Muirthile, Poet, Writer & Journalist

Liam Ó Muirthile, prominent Irish language poet and journalist who also writes plays and novels, is born in Cork, County Cork, on November 15, 1950. He originally comes to the fore as a member of a group of poets from University College Cork (UCC) who collaborate in the journal Innti in the late 1960s.

Ó Muirthile is educated at cork, taking a BA in Irish and French at UCC. His Irish is acquired at school and from sojourns in the Gaeltacht of West Kerry. He is a member of a group of poets at UCC in the late 1960s who choose Irish as a creative medium and are closely associated with the modernist poetry journal Innti, founded by fellow poet Michael Davitt. They are influenced by the work of Cork poet Seán Ó Ríordáin, by the musician and composer Seán Ó Riada, and by popular American culture.

Greg Delanty, writing for Poetry International, claims that a fundamental achievement of Ó Muirthile and other members of the Innti group was to adapt the language to a contemporary urban landscape in a way that reflected the counterculture of the sixties.

Ó Muirthile has been described as a poet of immense formal and musical mastery who reads deeply into the classical and neo-classical poetry of the Irish language. He studies French literature as a student and this influences his work. He translates poetry by Guillaume Apollinaire, François Villon, Jacques Prévert and Anne Hébert.

Ó Muirthile’s first collection of poetry is Tine Chnámh (1984). This receives the Irish American Cultural Institute’s literary award and an Oireachtas prize for poetry. He subsequently publishes a number of other collections. In 1996, he receives the Butler Award for his novel Ar Bhruach na Laoi. Several plays by him have been staged. From 1989 to 2003 he writes a weekly column, “An Peann Coitianta,” for The Irish Times. Poems by him have been translated into English, German, French, Italian, Hungarian and Romanian.

Two of Ó Muirthile‘s poems, Meachán Rudaí and Áthas, have been put to music by the Irish/American group The Gloaming and featured on their third studio album The Gloaming 3.

Ó Muirthile dies peacefully in St. Vincent’s Hospital, Dublin, on May 18, 2018. A Requiem Mass is held in Holy Family Church, Kill of the Grange, County Dublin, on May 21. This is followed with prayers and music in St. Gobnait’s Church, Cúil Aodha, County Cork, which precedes his burial in Reilig Ghobnatan, Ballyvourney.


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Death of Maeve Brennan, Writer & Journalist

Maeve Brennan, short story writer and journalist, dies in a nursing home in Arverne, Queens, New York City, on November 1, 1993. She is an important figure in both Irish diaspora writing and in Irish literature itself. Collections of her articles, short stories, and a novella have been published.

Brennan is born in Dublin on January 6, 1917, one of four siblings, and grows up at 48 Cherryfield Avenue in the Dublin suburb of Ranelagh. She and her sisters are each named after ancient Irish Queens: Emer, Deirdre and Maeve. Her parents, Robert and Úna Brennan, both from County Wexford, are republicans and are deeply involved in the Irish political and cultural struggles of the early twentieth century. They participate in the 1916 Easter Rising but while Úna is imprisoned for a few days, Robert is sentenced to death. The sentence is commuted to penal servitude.

Robert’s continuing political activity results in further imprisonments in 1917 and 1920. Brennan is born while he was in prison. He is director of publicity for the anti-Treaty Irish Republican Army during the Irish Civil War. He also founds and is the director of The Irish Press newspaper. His imprisonments and activities greatly fragment her childhood. In her story The Day We Got Our Own Back she recounts her memory of how, when she was five, her home was raided by Irish Free State forces looking for her father, who was on the run.

Robert Brennan is appointed the Irish Free State’s first minister to the United States, and the family moves to Washington, D.C. in 1934, when Brennan is seventeen. She attends the Sisters of Providence Catholic school in Washington, Immaculata Seminary, graduating in 1936. She then graduates with a degree in English from American University in 1938. She and her two sisters remain in the United States when her parents and brother return to Ireland in 1944.

Brennan moves to New York City and finds work as a fashion copywriter at Harper’s Bazaar in the 1940s. She also writes a Manhattan column for the Dublin society magazine Social and Personal, and writes several short pieces for The New Yorker magazine. In 1949, she is offered a staff job by William Shawn, The New Yorker‘s managing editor.

Brennan first writes for The New Yorker as a social diarist. She writ’s sketches about New York life in The Talk of the Town section under the pseudonym “The Long-Winded Lady.” She also contributes fiction criticism, fashion notes, and essays. She writes about both Ireland and the United States.

The New Yorker begins publishing Brennan’s short stories in 1950. The first of these stories is called The Holy Terror. In it, Mary Ramsay, a “garrulous, greedy heap of a woman” tries to keep her job as a ladies’ room attendant in a Dublin hotel.

Brennan’s work is fostered by William Keepers Maxwell, Jr., and she writes under The New Yorker managing editors Harold Ross and William Shawn. Although she is widely read in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s, she is almost unknown in Ireland, even though Dublin is the setting of many of her short stories.

A compendium of Brennan’s New Yorker articles called The Long-Winded Lady: Notes from the New Yorker is published in 1969. Two collections of short stories, In and Out of Never-Never Land (1969) and Christmas Eve (1974) are also published.

Brennan’s career does not really take off until after her death which leads many of her stories to be reintroduced to the public and many articles written about her up until her passing.

The love of Brennan’s life is reportedly writer and theatre critic/director Walter Kerr but he breaks off their engagement and marries writer Bridget Jean Collins.

In 1954, Brennan marries St. Clair McKelway, The New Yorker‘s managing editor. McKelway has a history of alcoholism, womanizing and manic depression and has already been divorced four times. She and McKelway divorce after five years.

Brennan is writing consistently and productively in the late 1960s. By the time her first books are published, however, she is showing signs of mental illness. Her previously immaculate appearance becomes unkempt. Her friends begin to find her eccentricities disturbing rather than entertaining. She becomes obsessive.

In the 1970s, Brennan becomes paranoid and alcoholic. Hospitalized on numerous occasions, she becomes destitute and homeless, frequently sleeping in the women’s lavatory at The New Yorker. She is last seen at the magazine’s offices in 1981.

In the 1980s, Brennan vanishes from view and her work is forgotten. After wandering from one transient hotel to another along 42nd Street, she is admitted to Lawrence Nursing Home in Arverne.

Brennan dies of a heart attack on November 1, 1993, aged 76, and is buried in Queens, New York City.