Brian Merriman, Irish languagepoet and teacher, dies in County Limerick on July 27, 1805. His single surviving work of substance, the 1000-line long Cúirt An Mheán Oíche (The Midnight Court) is widely regarded as the greatest comic poem in the history of Irish literature.
Merriman teaches at various schools in the area for about twenty years, first at Kilclaran and later in a school near his farm. The teaching profession in those days attracts those with a taste for literature. Many of the Irish poets of the 18th and 19th centuries are school teachers. It allows them to exist while they write. Later on he becomes resident tutor to the families of the local gentry.
This may be where Merriman gets the subject matter for his poem Cúirt an Mhéan Óiche. It is likely that he has access to books of European literature which give him ideas for the theme. His famous poem, written in his native Irish language, has well over a thousand lines. It has been translated into English as The Midnight Court by many translators. The principal themes are the plight of young women who lack husbands, clerical celibacy, free love, and the misery of a young woman married to a withered old man. It is written in the form of a vision or aisling. Merriman falls asleep on the shores of Lough Graney near Feakle in East Clare and finds himself present at a fairy court where the women of Ireland are discussing their great problems. It is believed that he writes the poem as a result of certain frustrations he has or of some complex he suffers from. His vigour, fluency and earthy humour make his poem widely popular and while he is still alive numerous manuscript copies are circulated.
Merriman marries around 1787 and has two daughters. In 1797, the Royal Dublin Society awards him two prizes for his flax crop. Around 1800 he moves to County Limerick, where he runs a school until his death on July 27, 1805. He is buried in Feakle. His grave has not been located but a plaque honouring his memory has been erected in Feakle churchyard.
In commemoration of Merriman’s poetic works an Annual Merriman Summer School is held each year in County Clare.
Cousins produces several books of poetry while in Ireland as well as acting in the first production of Cathleen ní Houlihan, under the stage name of H. Sproule, with the famous Irish revolutionary and beauty Maud Gonne in the title role. His plays are produced in the first years of the twentieth century in the Abbey Theatre, the most famous being “the Racing Lug”. After a dispute with W.B. Yeats, who objects to “too much Cousins,” the Irish National Theatre movement splits with two-thirds of the actors and writers siding with Cousins against Yeats.
Cousins also writes widely on the subject of Theosophy and in 1915 travels to India with the voyage fees paid for by Annie Besant, the President of the Theosophical Society. He spends most of the rest of his life in the sub-continent, apart from a year as Professor of English Literature at Keio University in Tokyo and another lecturing in New York. Toward the end of his life, he converts to Hinduism. At the core of Cousins’s engagement with Indian culture is a firm belief in the “shared sensibilities between Celtic and Oriental peoples.”
In his The Future PoetrySri Aurobindo acclaims Cousins’ New Ways in English Literature as “literary criticism, which is of the first order, at once discerning and suggestive, criticism which forces us both to see and think.” He also acknowledges that he learned to intuit deeper being alerted by Cousins’ criticisms of his poems. In 1920 Cousins comes to Pondicherry to meet the Mother and Sri Aurobindo.
Ball is, however, best known for his scholarship, particularly for his work on Jonathan Swift, the local history of Dublin and on the history of the judiciary in Ireland from 1221 to 1921. The destruction of the Four Courts in 1922, during the Irish Civil War, and of the public records and legal archives it contained (especially those of the Irish Public Records Office) make his prior research into the history of the Irish judiciary up to 1921 particularly valuable to later scholars. The review published in the Irish Law Times & Solicitors’ Journal described it as “a truly marvellous condensation of judicial history involving the exhaustive study of a long period, the earlier part of which was hitherto obscure.” The same review characterised Ball as “a writer of great care and accuracy, whose work is always characterised by minute and diligent research.”
Ball also serves as a governor of the Blue Coat School, Oxmantown, Dublin. Francis Elrington Ball dies in 1928.
William Maginn, journalist and miscellaneous writer, is born in Cork on July 10, 1794.
Maginn becomes a contributor to Blackwood’s Magazine and, after moving to London in 1824, becomes for a few months in 1826 the Paris correspondent to The Representative, a paper started by John Murray, the publisher. When its short career is run, he helps to found in 1827 the ultra ToryStandard, a newspaper that he edits along with a fellow graduate of Trinity College, Dublin, Stanley Lees Giffard. He also writes for the more scandalous Sunday paper, The Age.
In 1830 Maginn instigates and becomes one of the leading supporters of Fraser’s Magazine. His Homeric Ballads, much praised by contemporary critics, are published in Fraser’s between 1839 and 1842. In 1837, Bentley’s Miscellany is launched, with Charles Dickens as editor, and Maginn writes the prologue and contributes over the next several years a series of “Shakespeare Papers” that examine characters in counter-intuitive fashion. From “The Man in the Bell” (Blackwood’s, 1821) through “Welch Rabbits” (Bentley’s, 1842) Maginn is an occasional though skillful writer of short fiction and tales. His only novel, Whitehall (1827) pretends to be a historical novel set in 1820s England written in the year 2227. It is a droll spoof of the vogue for historical novels as well as the contemporary political scene.
In 1836, Maginn fights a duel with Grantley Berkeley, a member of Parliament. Berkeley had brutally assaulted magazine publisher James Fraser over a review Maginn wrote of Berkeley’s novel Berkeley Castle, and Maginn calls him out. Three rounds are fired but no one is struck.
One of the most brilliant periodical writers of his time, Maginn leaves little permanent work behind him. In his later years, his intemperate habits land him in debtor’s prison. When he emerges through the grace of the Insolvent Debtor’s Act he is in an advanced stage of tuberculosis. He writes until the end, including in the first volume of Punch, but he dies in extreme poverty in Walton-on-Thames, London on August 21, 1842, survived by his wife Ellen, and daughters Annie and Ellen, and son John. His nephew Francis Maginn, who is deaf, is a co-founder of the British Deaf and Dumb Association, now called the British Deaf Association (BDA).
Doyle is born at 11 Picardy Place, Edinburgh, Scotland, on May 22, 1859. His father, Charles Altamont Doyle, is an Englishman of Irish Catholic descent and his mother, Mary (née Foley), is Irish Catholic. Charles dies in 1893, in the Crichton Royal Hospital, Dumfries, after many years of psychiatric illness. Supported by wealthy uncles, Doyle is sent to the Jesuit preparatory school Hodder Place, Stonyhurst, at the age of nine. He then goes on to Stonyhurst College until 1875. From 1875 to 1876, he is educated at the Jesuit school Stella Matutina in Feldkirch, Austria. Doyle later rejects the Catholic faith and becomes an agnostic. He also later becomes a spiritualist mystic.
From 1876 to 1881 Doyle studies medicine at the University of Edinburgh Medical School. While studying, he begins writing short stories. His first published piece, The Mystery of Sasassa Valley, is printed in Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal on September 6, 1879. After stints as a ship’s doctor and a failed medical practice with former classmate George Turnavine Budd, Doyle arrives in Portsmouth in June 1882 and sets up a medical practice at 1 Bush Villas in Elm Grove, Southsea. The practice is slow to develop and while waiting for patients, Doyle again begins writing fiction. In 1890, Doyle studies ophthalmology in Vienna and moves to London.
A sequel to A Study in Scarlet is commissioned and The Sign of the Four appears in Lippincott’s Magazine in February 1890, the last under agreement with the Ward Lock company. Short stories featuring Sherlock Holmes are published in TheStrand Magazine.
In December 1893, wanting to dedicate more time to historical novels, Doyle has Holmes and Professor Moriarty plunge to their deaths together down the Reichenbach Falls in the The Final Problem. Public outcry, however, leads him to feature Holmes in 1901 in the novel The Hound of the Baskervilles. Holmes is ultimately featured in a total of 56 short stories, the last published in 1927, and four novels by Doyle.
Between 1888 and 1906, Doyle writes seven historical novels, which many critics regard as his best work. He also authors nine other novels and, later in his career between 1912 and 1929, five stories, two of novella length, featuring the irascible scientist Professor Challenger.
Doyle is a supporter of the campaign for the reform of the Congo Free State, led by the journalist E. D. Morel and diplomat Roger Casement. He becomes acquainted with Morel and Casement and, together with Bertram Fletcher Robinson, they inspire several characters in the 1912 novel The Lost World. When Casement is found guilty of treason against the Crown during the 1916 Easter Rising, Doyle tries unsuccessfully to save him from facing the death penalty, arguing that Casement has been driven mad and cannot be held responsible for his actions.
Found clutching his chest in the hall of Windlesham Manor, his house in Crowborough, East Sussex, on July 7, 1930, Doyle dies of a heart attack at the age of 71. At the time of his death there is some controversy concerning his burial place, as he is avowedly not a Christian, but rather considers himself a Spiritualist. He is first buried on July 11, 1930, in Windlesham rose garden. He is later reinterred together with his wife in Minstead churchyard in the New Forest, Hampshire.
Maning is the eldest son of moderately wealthy, ProtestantAnglo-Irish parents. His father, Frederick Maning, emigrates to Van Diemen’s Land in 1824 with his wife and three sons to take up farming. Young Maning becomes a skilled outdoorsman and builds up the physical strength to match his six-foot, three-inch stature. In 1829, his father becomes a customs officer in Hobart and moves there with his family. By 1832, Frederick leaves home to manage a remote outpost in the north of Tasmania. Soon after, he decides to pursue his fortune in New Zealand.
Maning arrives in the Hokianga area on June 30, 1833, and lives among the NgāpuhiMāori people. With his physical skills and great stature, as well as his considerable good humor, he quickly gains favour with the tribe. He becomes known as a Pākehā Māori (a European turned native) and his arrival in New Zealand is the subject of the first chapters of his book Old New Zealand.
In 1837, he sells his property and returns to Hobart. He returns to Hokianga in March 1839 and in September purchases 200 acres for a farm at Onoke. He builds a house there that is standing until destroyed by fire in 2004. He takes a Māori wife, Moengoroa, and they have four children.
In 1840, Maning acts as a translator at meetings about the Treaty of Waitangi, and he advises the local Māori to not sign. His vocal opposition to the Treaty is primarily because he has settled with the Māori precisely to escape from the restrictions of European civilisation. He fears that the introduction of European style law will put a damper on his lifestyle and on his entrepreneurial trading activities. He warns the Māori that European colonisation will degrade them. Governor William Hobson counters by telling the Māori that without British Law, lawless self-interested Europeans without any regard for Māori rights will soon take all their land. Maning’s book Old New Zealand is, in part, a lament for the lost freedom enjoyed before European rule.
In 1845–1846, during the Māori Wars, Maning sometimes uses his influence with the Māori to intercede on behalf of settlers. He also organises supplies to the government’s Māori supporters. However, he writes his second book, History of the War in the North of New Zealand against the Chief Heke, from the perspective of an imaginary supporter of Hōne Heke, who is one of the principal antagonists opposing the government.
Through the 1850s, Maning primarily occupies himself with timber and gum trade. In the early 1860s, he retires from business activities. In 1865, he enters the public service as a judge of the Native Land Court, where his unequalled knowledge of the Māori language, customs, traditions and prejudices are of solid value.
Maning retires in 1876 although he helps conduct a major land court hearing at Taupo in 1881. He becomes estranged from his children in his later years. In November 1882, he goes to London for an operation, however, he dies there on July 25, 1883, of cancer. At his wish, his body is taken back to New Zealand and buried in December 1883, in the Symonds Street Cemetery in Auckland.
Maning is chiefly remembered as the author of two short books, Old New Zealand and History of the War in the North of New Zealand against the Chief Heke. Both books have been reprinted many times and have become classics of New Zealand literature.
Mary Colum (née Maguire), literary critic and author, is born in Collooney, County Sligo on June 14, 1884, the daughter of Charles Maguire and Catherine Gunning. She is the author of several books, including the autobiographical Life and the Dream (1947), and From These Roots: The Ideas that Have Made Modern Literature (1937), a collection of her criticism.
Maguire’s mother dies in 1895, leaving her to be reared by her grandmother, Catherine, in Ballysadare, County Sligo. She attends boarding school in St. Louis’ Convent in Monaghan, County Monaghan.
Educated at Royal University of Ireland Maguire is founder of the Twilight Literary Society which leads her to meet William Butler Yeats. She regularly attends the Abbey Theatre and is a frequent visitor amongst the salons, readings and debates there. After graduation in 1909 she teaches with Louise Gavan Duffy at St. Ita’s, a companion school to Patrick Pearse‘s St. Enda’s School. She is active with Thomas MacDonagh and others in national and cultural causes and co-founds The Irish Review (1911–14) with David Houston, MacDonagh and others. She, along with her husband, Padraic Colum, whom she marries in July 1912, edit the magazine for some months of its four-year run. She is encouraged by Yeats to specialise in French literary criticism and to translate Paul Claudel.
Colum associates with James Joyce in Paris and discourages him from duping enquirers about the origins of the interior monologue in the example of Édouard Dujardin. She accepts Joyce’s very ill daughter, Lucia, for a week in their Paris flat at the height of her “hebephrenic” attack, while herself preparing for an operation in May 1932. She serves as the literary editor of The Forum magazine from 1933–1941 and commences teaching comparative literature with Padraic at Columbia University in 1941.
She rebuts Oliver St. John Gogarty‘s intemperate remarks about Joyce in The Saturday Review of Literature in 1941.
Colum’s publications become increasingly sparse in the 1950s as her arthritis and neuralgia grow more and more severe. She dies in New York City on October 22, 1957. At the time of her death, she is working on Our Friend James Joyce with her husband, each writing various chapters. It is assembled posthumously by Padraic Colum and is published by Doubleday on August 22, 1958.
Yeats is the oldest child of John Butler Yeats and Susan Mary Pollexfen. Although John trained as a lawyer, he abandons the law for art soon after his first son is born. Yeats spends much of his early years in London, where his father is studying art, but frequently returns to Ireland.
In the mid-1880s, Yeats pursues his own interest in art as a student at the Metropolitan School of Art in Dublin. Following the publication of his poems in the Dublin University Review in 1885, he soon abandons art school for other pursuits.
After returning to London in the late 1880s, Yeats meets writers Oscar Wilde, Lionel Johnson and George Bernard Shaw. He also becomes acquainted with Maud Gonne, a supporter of Irish independence. This revolutionary woman serves as a muse for Yeats for years. He even proposes marriage to her several times, but she turns him down. He dedicates his 1892 drama The Countess Cathleen to her.
Around this time, Yeats founds the Rhymers’ Club poetry group with Ernest Rhys. He also joins the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, an organization that explores topics related to the occult and mysticism. While he is fascinated with otherworldly elements, Yeats’s interest in Ireland, especially its folktales, fuels much of his output. The title work of The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems (1889) draws from the story of a mythic Irish hero.
In addition to his poetry, Yeats devotes significant energy to writing plays. He teams with Lady Gregory to develop works for the Irish stage, the two collaborating for the 1902 production of Cathleen ni Houlihan. Around that time, he helps found the Irish National Theatre Society, serving as its president and co-director, with Lady Gregory and John Millington Synge. More works soon follow, including On Baile’s Strand, Deirdre and At the Hawk’s Well.
Following his marriage to Georgie Hyde-Lees in 1917, Yeats begins a new creative period through experiments with automatic writing. The newlyweds sit together for writing sessions they believe to be guided by forces from the spirit world, through which Yeats formulates intricate theories of human nature and history. They soon have two children, daughter Anne and son Michael.
Yeats then becomes a political figure in the new Irish Free State, serving as a senator for six years beginning in 1922. The following year, he receives an important accolade for his writing as the recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature. According to the official Nobel Prize website, he is selected “for his always inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation.”
Mary Josephine Lavin, noted Irish short story writer and novelist, is born in Walpole, Massachusetts on June 10, 1912. She is regarded as a pioneering female author in the traditionally male-dominated world of Irish letters. Her subject matter often deals explicitly with feminist issues and concerns as well as a deep Catholic faith.
Lavin is the only child born to Tom and Nora Lavin, an immigrant Irish couple. She attends primary school in East Walpole until the age of ten, when her mother decides to go back to Ireland. Initially, Mary and Nora live with Nora’s family in Athenry, County Galway. Afterwards, they purchase a house in Dublin, and Mary’s father comes back from the United States to join them.
Lavin attends Loreto College, a convent school in Dublin, before going on to study English and French at University College Dublin (UCD). She teaches French at Loreto College for a while. As a postgraduate student, she publishes her first short story, “Miss Holland,” which appears in the The Dublin Magazine in 1938. Tom Lavin then approaches Edward Plunkett, 18th Baron of Dunsany, the well-known Irish writer, on behalf of his daughter and asks him to read some of Mary’s unpublished work. Suitably impressed, Lord Dunsany becomes her literary mentor.
In 1943, Lavin publishes her first book, Tales from Bective Bridge, a volume of ten short stories about life in rural Ireland. It is a critical success and goes on to win the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction. That same year, she marries William Walsh, a Dublin lawyer. Over the next decade, the couple has three daughters and moves to “abbey farm” which they purchase in County Meath and includes the land around Bective Abbey. Her literary career flourishes. She publishes several novels and collections of short stories during this period. Her first novel, The House in Clewe Street, is serialised in The Atlantic Monthly before its publication in book form in 1945.
In 1954, William Walsh dies. Lavin, her reputation as a major writer already well-established, is left to confront her responsibilities alone. She raises her three daughters and keeps the family farm going at the same time. She also manages to keep her literary career on track, continuing to publish short stories and winning several awards for her work, including the Katherine Mansfield Prize in 1961, Guggenheim Fellowships in 1959 and 1961, and an honorary doctorate from UCD in 1968. Some of her stories written during this period, dealing with the topic of widowhood, are acknowledged to be among her finest.
Lavin remarries in 1969. Michael Scott is an old friend from her student days in University College. He has been a Jesuit priest in Australia but has obtained release from his vows from Rome and returned to Ireland. The two remain together until Scott’s death in 1991.
In 1992, Lavin, by now retired, is elected Saoi by the members of Aosdána for achieving “singular and sustained distinction” in literature. Aosdána is an affiliation of creative artists in Ireland, and the title of Saoi one of the highest honours in Irish culture.
Mary Lavin dies at the age of 83 on March 25, 1996.
James Plunkett Kelly, known by the pen name James Plunkett, Irish novelist, playwright, and short-story writer, dies in Dublin on May 28, 2003. His works, which deal with Ireland’s political and labour problems, contain vivid portraits of working-class and middle-class Dubliners.
Plunkett is born in Sandymount, Dublin on May 21, 1920, and grows up among the Dublin working class and they, along with the petite bourgeoisie and lower intelligentsia, make up the bulk of the dramatis personæ of his oeuvre. He is educated at Synge Street CBS, a Christian Brothers school located on Synge Street in Dublin. He leaves school at the age of seventeen. He later studies violin and viola at the Dublin College of Music and plays professionally in Dublin. He serves for a time as an official in the Workers’ Union of Ireland.
Plunkett’s best-known works are the novel Strumpet City, set in Dublin in the years leading up to the Dublin lock-out of 1913 and during the course of the strike, and the short stories in the collection The Trusting and the Maimed. His other works include a radio play on James Larkin, who figures prominently in his work.
During the 1960s, Plunkett works as a producer at Telefís Éireann. He wins two Jacob’s Awards, in 1965 and 1969, for his TV productions. In 1971 he writes and presents “Inis Fail – Isle of Destiny,” his very personal appreciation of Ireland. It is the final episode of the BBC series Bird’s Eye View, shot entirely from a helicopter, and the first co-production between the BBC and RTÉ. Plunkett is a member of Aosdána.
James Plunkett dies in a Dublin nursing home on May 28, 2003, just a week after his 83rd birthday. He is cremated at Mount Jerome Cemetery and Crematorium in Dublin.
A second-year class, “2 Plunkett” at Synge Street CBS, is named in honour of James Plunkett.
seamus dubhghaill 