Ellen [Mary Patrick] Downing (1818-69)
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Life
| [‘Mary” of the Nation; also EMPD, and “Kate”]; b. 19 March 1818, Cork; dg. resident med. officer Cork Fever Hospital; added Patrick to her name at First Holy Communion 1839, St Patrick’s Church. Cork; contrib. to The Nation to 1847, appearing after in Mitchel’s United Irishman, where her writings are more militant; suffered ill-health as result of disappointment in love for Joseph Brenan [q.v.]; entered North Presentation Convent, 14 Oct. 1849; |
| took vows as Sister Mary Alphonsus, 1850, but quit the convent in 1851; suffering occasional bouts of paralysis; later joined Third Order of St Dominic, though residing in her own house; works incl. Voices of the Heart, ed. Most Rev. J. P. Leahy, Bishop of Dromore, Dublin 1868; enlarged ed., 1880; Novenas and Meditations, Leahy ed., Dublin 1879; issued Poems for Children (Dublin 1881); d. Mercy Hospital, Cork, 27 Jan., after a full year in a ward. CAB DBIV MKA RAF JMC |
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Criticism
Brigitte Anton, ‘Women of The Nation’, in History Ireland, 1, 3 (Autumn 1993), gives accounts of Ellen Mary Downing (Mary), with Mary Kelly (‘Eva’), Anna Francesca Elgee (‘Speranza’), Margaret Callan, née Hughes, and Jenny Mitchel, née Verner.
See also Richard D’Alton Williams’s “To Mary” - a poems warning against ‘martial verse’, of which he himself wrote so much himself - in Poems (1894), p.236ff. - with an introductory note by the editor, P. A. Sillard: ‘The Nation introduced this fine poem with the following: “Shamrock” has addressed “Mary” in a voice of such tender warning against martial verse, as makes us fear a Telemachus masquerading as a Mentor. He describes himself as commissioned “by Brida, the Irish Goddess of Poetry,” to utter this admonition. The Goddess descends to him in a vision, describes “Mary” as her chosen oracle, on whom she had conferred the divine gift of poeay,and proceeds to say:
“Since that hour the girl no longer played with childhood’s simple toys,
But each day, with impulse stronger, sought for high and holy joys;
But thou knowest the woe that slumbers music's shining waves beneath,
And how oft the poet's numbers from a bleeding bosom breathe.
[...”; &c.]Richard D’Alton Williams, Poems (1894), p.236ff; available at Internet Archive - online.)
Note: “Mary” is one of those addressed in “Valentine to Poetesses of the Nation” (ibid., p.174ff.; see note under Williams, infra.
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References
Brian McKenna, Irish Literature, 1800-1875: A Guide to Information Sources (Detroit: Gale Research Co. 1978) lists Poems for Children (1881); Voices of the Heart, Sacred Poems (1881); and Meditations and Prayers, prose (1879); and Comm., Matthew Russell, ‘Ellen Downing, Mary of the Nation,’ Irish Monthly 6 (1878); ‘Unpublished Relics ..’, Irish Monthly, 12 (1884); also an essay by Sean Ghall [pseud.] in United Irishman (15 March 1902).
Anthologies, Dublin Book of Irish Verse (1910) selects ‘My Owen’. Justin McCarthy, gen. ed., Irish Literature (Washington: University of America 1904); gives ‘My Owen,’ and ‘Talk by the Blackwater’.
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Notes
George Russell: Russell called her a saint and noted that she was much in demand as a religious teacher. Further: ‘she told her sister that to hear of the violent pain of any one almost always caused her to feel a precisely similar pain’. (q. source [p.461].)
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