Nora [Jane] Hopper

Life
1871-1906 [Eleanor Nora Chesson]; b. 2 jan., Exeter, dg. of Irish Army officer [Bengal 31st Regt.; injured in Sikh War] and former Miss Francis, from Wales; brought up by her mother in Kensington and Notting Hill after the early death of her father; ed. Cumberland House, kensington; first published in Family Herald, 1887; m. W[ilfred] H[ugh] Chesson, author, in 1887; wrote Ballads in Prose (1894), which containing the ‘Temple of Heroes’ set on a Shannon island which Yeats emulated , and which caused him to call it ‘an absolute creation, an enchanting tender little book full of style and wild melancholy’; poems incl. ‘The Dark Man’, ‘April in Ireland’, and ‘The Wind Among the Reeds’ [sic]; poems in New Ireland Review, Oct. 1897; contrib. The Dome [new ser.] (Oct.-Dec. 1898), with Yeats; The Celt, Sept. 1903; at first encouraged by Yeats, and listed among his ‘Best 30 Irish Books’ (Feb 1895), though her plagiarism increasingly irritated him; d. 14 April; jher selected poems were edited with an biog. preface by her husband and ain introductory by F. M. Heuffer [Ford Madox Ford]; see also Irish Book Lover, March 1913. DBIV NCBE IF DIL OCIL

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Works
Poetry
  • Ballads in Prose (London: John Lane 1894).
  • Under Quicken Boughs, poems (John Lane 1896).
  • Songs of the Morning (London: Grant Richards 1900).
  • Aquamarines (London: Grant Richards 1902), xiii, 241pp. [see contents]
  • Mildred and Her Mills, and Other Poems (London: Raphael Tuck 1903).
  • Old Fairy Legends in New Colours, by T. E. Donnison, with verses by N. Chesson [Hopper] (London: Raphael Tuck 1903).
  • With Louis Wain to Fairyland (London: Raphael Tuck 1904).
  • Dirge for Aoine and Other Poems (London: Alston Rivers MCMVI [1906]) [poems, pp.xvii [Dirge for Aoine] to xxxiv [Dalua];
  • A Dead Girl to her Lover and Other Poems (London: Alston Rivers 1906).
  • Jack O’Lanthorn and Other poems (London: Alston Rivers 1906).
  • The Waiting Widow and Other Poems (London: Alston Rivers 1906).
Selected
  • Selected Poems, ed. db W. H. Chesson; intro. by F. M. Heuffer, 5 vols. (London: Alston Rivers 1908), Vol. I: Biog. note by W. H. Chesson, intro. pp.vii-ix; Introductory, pp.xi-xvi. available online; accessed 10.03.2024]. Note: The vols. correspond to her collections, bound together and each with sep. roman pagination.]
Prose
  • The Bell and the Arrow, An English Love Story (London: T. Werner Laurie 1905) [a novel].
  • Father Felix’s Chronicles, ed. W. H. Chesson (London: T. F. Unwin 1907), 312pp. [front port.]
  • Children’s Stories from Tennyson [1914] - a volume of paraphrases;

Drama
  • Muirgheis, an Irish opera in three acts, trans. by Torna [Tadhg O’Donoghue], Ireland Review (Sept. 1910).

Bibliographical details
Aquamarines (London: Grant Richards 1902), xiii, 241pp. CONTENTS:

Commentary
Stephen Gwynn, “The Irish Drama” [intro. essay], in Justin McCarthy ed., Irish Literature (1904), Vol. IX, quotes , ‘He follows on for eery, when all your chase is done,/he follows after shadows, the King of Ireland’s son’. (p.xv.) the poem tells how Connla, son of Conn the Hundred-fighter, left a proffered throne to follow a fairy woman. Gwynn considers the two lines more effective that James Cousin [Seamus O’Cuisin’s] play on the subject in The Racing Lug.

W. B. Yeats: ‘Miss Hopper belongs to that school of writers which embodies passions, that are not the less spiritual because no Church has put them into prayers, in stories and symbols from old Celtic poetry and mythology.’ (“Modern Irish Poetry”, in Justin McCarthy, ed., Irish Literature, 1904, Vol. III, p.xiii.) Note that Yeats previously wrote to the Mrs. [Eliz. Amelia] Sharpe [sic], the wife of William Sharp [aka Fiona MacLeod], ending a short letter with a postscript, ‘Do you know Miss Hoppers [sic] verse. She is very Celtic.’ (Letter of 12 July [1895], in Letters, Vol. 1, ed. John Kelly, p.469.) Sharp later accused Hopper of plagiarism in a letter to Katharine Tynan (Letters, ed. Hone, vol. I, pp.425-26 [January 1898]).

Ernest A. Boyd, Ireland’s Literary Renaissance (Dublin: Maunsel 1916) - Chapter IX - The Revival of Poetry

In 1894 Nora Hopper’s Ballads in Prose announced a newcomer to the group of young Irish poets in [195] London who were striving to add the evidence of their work to the theories for which Yeats had become sponsor. By this time the “Celtic Movement” had become an accepted fact in contemporary journalism, and Yeats, partly because of his incessant propaganda, and partly because of his own success, was the recognised leader of the so-called “school.” If ever this word had any justification, it was in the case of Nora Hopper, who came forward manifestly as a disciple of Yeats. [... T]he poems were flagrantly imitative, even to such a degree as:

I will arise and go hence to the west,
And dig me a grave where the hill-winds call... .

Yeats’s Innisfree is here put under contribution as surely as are the verses, too numerous to quote, from which Nora Hopper borrowed her “long gray twilights,” “sighing sedge” and “gray sea.” The clumsiness of these lines, the triteness of thought and the stereotyped phrase which disfigure them, indicate the general quality of the volume in which they appear. All the clichés which the parodists have found useful when exercising their talents upon Irish poetry are represented in these poems. “ Silk of the kine,” “dear black head,” “beautiful dark rose” - none is missing.

Nora Hopper’s facile imagination surrendered itself too readily to passing influences. From the extravagant “Celticism” of her first books, and the conventional Anglicisation of the last, it is easy to estimate the instability of her talent. She had nothing of Lionel Johnson’s almost fierce fanaticism in religion and politics, but she resembled him in that both were transplanted Irish, born in England and naturally absorbed by it to some extent. In the first enthusiasm of the emotions awakened by the call to patriotism in literature Nora Hopper was carried away by the charm and wonder of Irish legend. The personal and national prestige of Yeats doubtless appealed to her and she wrote in an exuberance of Celtic feeling. But, as time went on, the encroachment of her actual English life weakened the impulse [199] towards Ireland, until finally her verse was undistinguishable from that of the multitude of minor English poets. The Revival held her just long enough to exhaust the slight vein of Irish poetry it discovered in her.

pp.194-99; see full copy in Library > “Critical Classics” - as attached.

Patrick Crotty: ‘A weak lyric of Nora Hopper anticipates the eponymous title of Yeats’s The Wind Among the Reeds’. (Review of W. J. McCormack, ed., Ferocious Humanism, Dent 2000, in Times Literary Supplement, 2 June 2000, pp.4-5.)

Note: This might be an allusion to her title, Wind in the Trees (1898) - which anticipates Yests"s Wind Among the Reeds by one year. See also her phrase, ‘dig me a grave where the hill-winds call’ in Ballads in Prose (1894) which Ernest Boyd cites as ‘putting’ Yeats’s Inisfree ‘under contribution’ - supra.

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References
William Sharp, Lyra Celtica; Dublin Book of Irish Verse, contains her ‘Dirge for Aoine’; ‘The Dark Man’; ‘The Fairy Music’; ‘Mo Bouchaleen Bwee’; ‘The Cold Wind’, ‘Gold Song’.

Stephen Brown, Ireland in Fiction (Dublin: Maunsel 1919); Ballads in Prose called ‘strange wayward tales of far-off pagan days ... soaked in Gaelic fairy and legendary lore’.]

Robert Hogan, ed., Dictionary of Irish Literature (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan 1979), entry on Hopper notes that she was admired by Yeats, who nevertheless felt she came near to plagiarising Tynan and himself; wrote libretto for The Sea Swan. Theatre Royal, Dublin (1903), with help on the plot from Moore; Yeats reviewed her Ballads; ‘haunted me ... spoke in strange wayward stories and birdlike little verses of things and persons I remembered or had dreamed of’, presumably because he was being plagiarised; Yeats lost sympathy with her by the third volume, Under Quicken Boughs (1896), ‘our Irish fairyland came to spoil her work.’

Seamus Deane, gen. ed., The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (Derry: Field Day 1991), Vol. 2; Hopper, Norah [sic] (Chesson); Yeats devoted his postscript to Literary Ideals in Ireland (1899) to ‘The Poetry and Stories of Miss Nora [sic] Hopper’, ‘.. Miss Hopper merely describes the Temple of the heroes as being on an island in the Shannon, and is sometimes even less certain about the places of her legends, though she has much feeling for landscape; and this uncertainty is, I believe, a defect in her method. Our legends are always associated with places ..’; he also refers to Aodh, a character in her poetry whom ed. adduces as an influence on Yeats’s story ‘The Binding of the Hair’ (1896), 958-59; cited with Lionel Johnson by Thomas MacDonagh as one of a few ‘who were born and who lived their whole lives out of Ireland, and yet are truly Irish’ (Literature in Ireland, 1916), 990.

Eilís Ní Dhuibhne ed., Voices on the Wind, Women Poets of the Celtic Twilight (New Island Books 1995), selects her poetry [with Katharine Tynan; Eva Gore-Booth; Susan Mitchell; Ethna Carbery; Dora Sigerson Shorter].

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Notes
Kith & Kin: her husand, W. H. Chesson, wrote A Great Lie (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1897), 241pp., and edited her Selected Poems (1906). he also wrote a study of George Cruikshank (1908), xii, 281., front., pls.

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