Katharine Tynan (1861-1931)

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Bibliographical details

Innocencies: A Book of Verse (London: Bullen 1905); Do. [facs. rep.] (Wentworth Press 2019), 78pp.

Twenty-one Poems of Katharine Tynan, sel. by W. B. Yeats (Dundrum: Dun Emer Press MCMVII [1907]), pp. CONTENTS [Page]; Sheep and Lambs [1]; Mater Dei [2]; Lambs [3]; Old Song Re-sung [3]; Easter [4]; The Weeping Babe [5]; 'Adveniat Regnum Tuum' [6]; The Legend of St. Austin and the Child [7]; Immortality [12]; The Only Child [13]; The Nurse [14]; Of St. Francis and the Ass [17]; St. Francis to the Birds [19]; The Children of Lir [22]; The Birds' Bargain [26]; A Gardener-Sage [27]; Nymphs [29]; Blessings [29]; The Doves [30]; Slow Spring [32]; The Foggy Dew [32]. (200 copies printed; see copy as attached.]

aThe Wild Harp: A Selection from Irish Lyrical Poetry, printed at the Ballantyne Press, London; with decorations by C M Watts (London: Sidgwick & Jackson Ltd. MCMXIII [1913]), ded. ‘To Lady Glenconnor for Traveller’s Joy’; Pref. ix-xv; poems by J. C. Mangan, George Fox, Samuel Ferguson; George Ogle; G. N. Reyonds; J. J. Callanan; Thomas Moore; Douglas Hyde; George Darley; Nora Chesson; Edward Walsh; George Sigerson; T. D’Arcy Magee [sic]; W. B. Yeats; A. G. Geoghegan; Dion Boucicault; Martin MacDermott; A. P. Graves; Stephen L. Gwynn; Dr. Anster; Joseph Campbell; Allingham; “AE“”; Alice Milligan; Moira O’Neill; William Dara [pseud.]; James Stephens; Aubrey de Vere; Eva Gore Booth; Padraic Colum; Emily Lawless; Herbert Trench; Henry de Vere Stacpoole; Dora Sigerson; Seumas O’Sullivan; John Todhunter; Nancy Campbell; Winifred M. Letts; James Joyce [‘I Hear an Army’].

The Cabinet of Irish Literature / Selections from the Works of / the Chief Poets, Orators, and Prose Writers / of Ireland / with biographical sketches and literary notices by / Charles A. Read, FRHS / Author of Tales and stories of Irish life; Stories from the Ancient Classics, &c. / New Edition / revised and greatly Extended by / Katharine Tynan Hinkson [formerly Katharine Tynan], / author of Poems, The Dear Irish Girl, She Walks in Beauty, A Girl of Galway, &c. / Vol. IV / London / The Gresham Publishing Company / 34 Southhampton Street, Strand / 1903 [vols. I-IV, 1902-1903; other imp. 1905, 1906, 1908], ills. [ports.], 8°. [See further details of the earlier edition under Charles Read, supra.]

Memories (London: E. Nash & Grayson 1924), 430pp. - contains chapter sections on Alice Meynell, Lord [Charles] Russell; A. M. Sullivan; Alice Meynell; Barry O’Brien; Edmund Leamy; Ellen O’Leary; Father Russell; Jane Barlow; John O’Leary; John Redmond; Lionel Johnson; Michael Davitt; Dora Sigerson; W. B. Yeats.

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Fiction of Katharine Tynan in Gutenberg Project at 19.10.2018 Mary Gray An Isle in the Water Peeps at Many Lands: Ireland The Story of Bawn The Great Captain: A Story of the Days of Sir Walter Raleigh Love of Brothers www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/7598 [accessed 19.10.2018]

See Twenty-one Poems of Katharine Tynan, sel. by W. B. Yeats (1907) - as attached.]

Poems of Katharine Tynan in Poemhunter at 19.10.2018 1. The Legend of St. Austin And The Child 2. The Old Soldier 3. The Promise 4. Starling 5. Palestine: 1917 6. Of St. Francis And The Ass 7. The Little Flock 8. The Little Old Woman 9. To The Others 10. To One In Grief 11. The Truce of God 12. The Vision (Katia: Easter Sunday, 1916) 13. Pilgrims To The East 14. Recompense (For Lord Kilhacken) 15. Salutation 16. Telling The Bees (For Edward Tennant) 17. The Test 18. The Only Son 19. of An Orchard 20. Lenton Communion 21. Farewell 22. They Who Return 23. The Wild Geese 24. The Vision 25. The Young Soldier 26. No Man’s Land 27. Noel 28. Missing 29. The Predestined 30. The Refuge 31. The Riders 32. The Young Mother 33. The Summons 34. The Wall Between 35. The New Recruit 36. Riding Home 37. Nymphs 38. The Bird’s Bargain 39. New Heaven 40. Lambs 41. Old Song Re-Sung 42. Indian Summer 43. Prayer at Night 44. The Lowlands of Flanders 45. The Watchers 46. The Secret Foe 47. Speeding 48. Herbal 49. Mediation 50. Meetings 51. To R A A 52. The Weeping Babe 53. Mater Dei 54. Menace 55. Lament 56. Haymaking 57. The Temple 58. The Refreshment 59. The Trust 60. The Deserted 61. The Aerodrome 62. Emptiness 63. The Widow 64. To Two Bereaved 65. The Boys of The House: For Valentine and Hubert Blake 66. Epiphany (For Dora, 1918) 67. Flower o’ The Year 68. His Footstep 69. Mid The Piteous Heaps of Dead 70. The Open Road 71. Good Friday, A.D. 33 72. The Long Vacation 73. The Last Parting 74. The Perfect Playmate 75. Song of Going 76. The Call 77. The Comrades 78. The Aerodrome 79. The Heroes 80. The Image 81. The Great Sorrow 82. The Bride 83. The Convent Garden 84. The Crown 85. The Dead Coach 86. The Brothers (For Arnold and Donald Fletcher) 87. The Great Chance 88. The Great May 89. The Last Question (For B. A. Bingham) 90. The Colonists 91. The Father 92. The Dream (For My Father) 93. For The Airmen 94. Unhousel’d, Unanointed, Unanel’d 95. High Summer 96. The Choice 97. What She Said 98. The Dear Brown Head 99. The Sad Spring 100. Vigil 101. The Old Love 102. Resurrection 103. Easter 104. The Fields of France 105. Distraction 106. When You Come Home 107. The Gardener 108. Shamrock Song 109. The Vestal 110. The Mother of Three 111. The Great Mercy 112. Slow Spring 113. What Turned the Germans Back 114. The Garden 115. The Heart of a Boy 116. Unfit 117. The Nurse 118. The Golden Boy 119. The Only Child 120. Joining The Colours 121. Turn O’ The Year 122. Wild Geese 123. A Colloquy (For M. W.) 124. Wings In The Night 125. All Souls 126. Immortality 127. A Connaught Man (For Hugh Maguire) 128. Autumnal 129. Comfort 130. Winter Sunset 131. St. Francis And The Birds 132. Christmas in the Year of the War 133. Colours 134. After Ascension 135. Dead- A Prisoner 136. The End of The Day 137. Flower of Youth 138. Adveniat Regnum Tuum 139. A Birth-Night Song 140. A Prayer (For Those Who Shall Return} 141. Any Mother 142. The Broken Soldier 143. The Foggy Dew 144. A Song of Going 145. The Children of Lir 146. A Holy Week Song, 1918 147. A Hero 148. The Doves 149. A Gardener-Sage 150. A Woman Commends Her Little Son 151. A Girl’s Song 152. A Lament 153. Alienation 154. The Wind That Shakes The Barley 155. Sheep And Lambs 156. Quiet Eyes 157. Blessings 158. A Song for the New Year {1915} 159. A Song of Spring 160. Any Woman Given at Poemhunter > Tynan at www.poemhunter.com/katharine-tynan/poems/ [accessed 19.10.2018]

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See Irish Book Lover Vols. 4, 8, 9, 11, 13.

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Commentary
Lionel Johnson (‘Poetry and Patriotism’, [Address to Irish National Literary Soc. 1892]): ‘I have heard it said that the four volumes of Mrs Hinkson show a steady increase in artistic power, but a noticeable decrease in the true Irish spirit of poetry, an extremely doubtful compliment to the true Irish spirit. ... What the critic meant was that in Mrs Hinkson’s earlier work there were a greater fluency and flow of sentiment, less restraint and careful finish, more obvious rhetoric and impulsiveness. The dainty delicacy of the later work, its mastery of rhythm and curbing of haste, were most upon him, the idea that all art implies discipline and austerity of taste, a constant progress toward an ideal perfection, though his earliest ancestors knew it well, seemed strange to him.’ (Rep. in Mark Story, Poetry and Ireland since 1800, A Source Book (1988), pp.93-106; p.99.

W. B. Yeats (1) “List of 30 best Irish Books” (Dublin Daily Express, 27 Feb. 1895), writes that in her Ballads and Lyrics Mrs Hinkson has given ‘a distinguished expression to much that is most characteristic in Irish Catholicism’ (Letters, ed., Wade, pp.246-51; p.250); that Yeats also referred to her generously in his essay ‘Irish National Literature, III’ (Bookman, Sept. 1895), where he says, ‘No living Irish poet has learned so much from the translators as Mrs Hinkson, and the great change this knowledge has made in her verse is an example of the necessity for Irish writers to study the native tradition’; he continues with an account of her development, and ends with assurance that her best will appear in the forthcoming Miracle Plays [1895], and avers that ‘her best inspiration has ever come from Catholic belief, and to give an excellent expression to the ancient symbols is to be for a delight and a comfort to many ardent and dutiful spirits.’ (John Frayne, ed., Uncollected Prose, Vol. I, 1970, pp.378-79).

Ghosts of London: Yeats wrote to Tynan: ‘This melancholy London - I sometimes imagine that the souls of the lost are compelled to walk through its streets perpetually. One feels them passing life a whiff of air.’ (25 Aug. 1888.)

W. B. Yeats (2), “Autobiography”, in Memoir, ed. Denis Donoghue (London: Macmillan 1972): ‘I wrote many letters to Katharine Tynan, a very plain woman, and one day I overheard somebody say that she was the kind of woman who might make herself very unhappy about a man. I began to wonder if she was in love with me and if it was my duty to marry her. Sometimes when she was in Ireland, I in London would think it possible that I should, but if she came to stay, or I saw her in Ireland, it became impossible again. Yet we were always very great friends and I have no reason to think she every thought of me otherwise.’ (p.32.)

W. B. Yeats (3): Yeats gives an impression of Katharine Tynan’s father in “Knight of the Sheep”, [a story] in The Celtic Twilight (1893) [see also Peter Ure, Yeats, 10963, p.28].

Note: There is an account of a proposal of marriage made by Yeats to Tynan - ‘would it not be a most lovely and suitable thing for two great poets to be united’ - which Tynan shrugs it off with ‘For heaven’s sake, you go to the devil!’, as recounted by her sister. (See R. F Foster, Life of W. B. Yeats, Vol. I, OUP 1997, p.72.)

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W. P. Ryan, The Irish Literary Revival (1894), Miss Katharine Tynan won speedy fame with poetry which showed a welcome new personality had strayed to Irish fields, though neither the spirit nore the form of the work was Celtic as we have understood it [9]. Further, Katharine Tynan, Mrs. Hinkson, Louise de la Valiere, Shamrocks, and later works; ‘her power is unquestioned, her nature is Irish, but her art and standpoint are sometimes English, strange to say. This is even evident in her Gaelic excursions ... Some of her religious poetry expresses the calm and the fervour of Irish faith. [117]

Dominic Daly, The Young Douglas Hyde (1974), writes: Katherine [sic] Tynan lived at fine farmhous at Clondalkin, south of Dublin; m. Henry Hinskon, TCD grad. Yeats writes of her in The Bookman, Sept. 1894, reviewing Cuckoo Songs, her fourth book of verse: ‘No living poet has learned so much from the translators as Mrs Hinkson, and the great change this knowledge has made on her verse is an example of the necessity for Irish writers to study the native tradition of expression. Her first two books, Louis de Valliere [1885] and Shamrocks [1887], contained here and there a moving lyric, but were on the whole merely excellent in promise ... The work of the Irish folklorists, and the translations of Dr Hyde and of an earlier poet, the village schoolmaster Edward Walsh, began to affect her, however, soon afterthe publication of Shamrocks; and the best of Ballads and Lyrics and Cuckoo Songs have the freedom from rhetoric, the simplicity and tenderness, though not the passion, of the Gaelic poets’ [85] (Cont.)

Dominic Daly (The Young Douglas Hyde, 1974) - cont.: In a diary entry of 23 Jan 1887, Hyde notes walking four miles to the Tynan farm - four sisters, a brother and her father - ‘they all have a frightful brogue. Her father is a farmer with three hundred acres.’ On the following day he meets them in College, and shows them around, ‘and all the time I was terribly embarrassed lest anyone should see me talking to them. Katherine was alright but her sister was a sight. I gave them tea, cakes and sweets, etc., and Yeates [sic] came in at the same time.’ Tynan has an account of the visit: ‘there was a day when we had tea with Douglas Hyde in Trinity College. Perhaps Craoibhin Aoibhin ... was at his least inspiring within the walls of his Alma Mater, which was no more motherly to the future lighter of the Gaelic torch in Ireland than she had been to any other of her great sons. I recall the event without any glow of pleasure. It seems to be been a somewhat conventional entertainment, which was not the case with anything in which Douglas Hyde took a hand.’ (Twenty-five Years, London 1913, p.207.)

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Patricia Boylan, All Cultivated People (Gerrards Cross 1988), contains numerous references [10, 14, 15, 57-60, 62, 67, 68, 69, 76, 78, 91, 92, 94, 99, 105, 109, 111, 112, 149, 219, 262, ed. Encyclopaedic Cabinet of Irish Literature [sic], 58; Flower of Youth, 91-92; Five Years Reminiscences, 67, 76; The Years of Shadow, 62, 105; also remarks about her husband]. Her poems, “Flower of Youth”, expeditiously written and published in October; the title poem extraordinarily popular; copies sold to aid Red Cross; a thousand distributed to bereaved mothers in a South of England town, and the Bishop of London used it several times in sermons; to assuage the guilt / grief of mothers who had given their sons to the war was so urgent a duty that the Bishop may not have noticed the peculiar role given to God, ‘Lest Heaven be thronged with greybeards hoary. / God who made boys for His delight / Stoops in a day of grief and glory / And calls them in, in from the night. / When they come trooping from the war / Our skies have many a new young star ... Dear boys! they shall be young forever. / The son of God was once a boy. / They run and leap by a clear river / And of their mirth they have great joy. / God who made boys so clean and good / Smiles with the eyes of fatherhood.’ [91-2]. Further, ‘she refused to risk George Moore when her publishers asked her to revise the four vols. of Encyclopaedic Cabinet of Irish Literature, bringing it up to date with another volume, and then compressing into four. When the publishers insisted ... she chose an excerpt from a play, judging the realistic novels Esther Waters and Sister Teresa ‘unsuitable to the Irish households which would purchase the monumental work’. But she had the courage of her convictions and ... bann[ed] a novelist because of ‘his incivility to Parnell in his last days’ [58].

Katie O’donovan, reviewing Voices on the Wind, Women Poets of the Celtic Twilight (New Island Books 1995), 144pp. in Irish Times [c.10.9.1995), remarks on ‘ground-breaking poems on motherhood’ and evocative descriptions of natural and rural scenes, combining in ‘The Little Hill’, where the beloved landscape is seen as symbol of the maternal breast; also notes ‘All in the April Evening’, and ‘High Summer’, set in idylic natural scene against backdrop of dying men in Flanders; cites also ‘Any Woman’.

John Devitt, reviewing Irish Stories 1893-1800, ed. Peter van de Kamp (Univ. of Leiden Press 1993) [incl. “A Maryr Indeed”; “How Mary Came Home”], in Irish Literary Supplement [Boston] (Spring 1994), remarks that the stories are marred by stylistic garrulity and uncertainty of technique; incls. themes of rural eccentricity, idiocy, madness anticipate Corkery more than Moore; includes venomous studies of female characters; revival of interest unlikely.

Henry Merritt, ‘“Willie Liar”: Yeats, A Novel, Love Poems and Three Women’, in Irish Studies Review (Winter 1994/95), pp.19-23, considers the poet’s ‘persistent deviousness’ in relation to women, focusing on his relations to Katharine Tynan, and especially the meaning of his pseud. “Ganconagh” in John Sherman, meaning ‘one who talks of love’ and plainly addressed to her; Yeat regularly kept her supplied with page proofs of Wanderings of Oisin as it came out.

Rolf & Magda Loeber, A Guide to Irish Fiction, 1650-1900 (Dublin: Four Courts Press 2006) - Introduction [discussing clerical attitudes towards fiction]: ‘[...] When the novelist Katharine Tynan finished her education at the Siena Dominican Convent in Drogheda, she had to sign the convent pledge that she would not dance “fast dances”, go the theatre, or read novels. In her autobiography, she wryly remarks that the pledge did not say anything about the writing of novels.’ (Tynan, Twenty-five Years: Reminiscences, New York, 1913, pp.54-55, 69; Loebers, op. cit., p.lxvi.)

J. W. Foster, Irish Novels 1890-1940: New Bearings in Culture and Fiction (Oxford UP 2008), notes that Tynan calculates precisely the train-and-boat timetable from London to Ireland (‘The Irish Mail leaves London every evening at eight forty-five and covers the distance to Holyhead in some six hours’ - A Cluster of Nuts, Being a Sketch of my Own People, Nisbet 1914, p.219) - and reflects on the author’s ‘author’s class identification with the English passengers [in the train] and her class revulsion, followed by an apparent gender offendedness and then anti-Irishness, when two bilingual Irish (male) seasonal farm-workers returning to Galway from England invade the carriage’ (pp.9-10). Further: ‘We would nowadays be tempted to recognise Tynan’s anti-Irishness as a form of self-dislike [...] However, it is likely that the deeper ensuing emotions are wounded Irish pride and then guilt at her intolerance, followed by an unsuccessful attempt to redeem herself through benign thoughts and actions. They are a surprisingly complex few pages fittingly set in the conveniently compact and telling capsule of the Irish male train and testify, certainly from the Irish side, to the intricacy of Anglo-Irish relations cross-hatched by class, gender, languge, culture, and race.’ (Foster, op. cit., pp.10.) Note: Tynan is extensively considered in Foster’s study, which touches on such titles as The Cabinet of Irish Literature, A Cluster of Nuts, Cousins and Others, Dick Pentreath, The Middle Years, The Wandering Years, and The Years of Shadow but most extensively on A Girl of Galway (at pp.203-13), The Golden Rose (at pp.424-29), An International Marriage (at pp.456-59), A Mad Marriage (at pp.256-28).

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Quotations

Poetry

“Apologia”, in Ballads and Lyrics (1891): ‘So in my book there will be found / No gleanings from a foreign ground, / If such you seek, go buy, go buy / Of some more travelled folk than I, / Kind Master Critic, say not, please, / How that her world so narrow is, / Since here she warns expectant eyes / That homely is her merchandise!’ Note that W. B. Yeats emulated the title in ‘Apologia to Ireland in the Coming Times’, printed at the end of “The Rose” section of The Countess Cathleen.

See a selection of the poems of Katharine Tynan - as attached:

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“Any Woman”: ‘I am the pillars of the house; / The keystone of the arch am I. / Take me away, and roof and wall / Would fall to ruin me utterly. // I am the fire upon the hearth, / I am the light of the good sun, / I am the heat that warms the earth, / Which else were colder than a stone. // At me the children warm their hands; / I am their light of love alive. / Without me cold the hearthstone stands, / Nor could the precious children thrive. // I am the twist that holds together / The children in its sacred ring, / Their knot of love, from whose close tether / No lost child goes a-wandering. // I am the house from floor to roof, / I deck the walls, the board I spread; / I spin the curtains, warp and woof, / And shake the down to be their bed. // I am their wall against all danger, / Their door against the wind and snow, / Thou Whom a woman laid in a manger, / Take me not till the children grow!’

“The Wind That Shakes the Barley”: ‘There’s music in my heart all day, / I hear it late and early, / It comes from fields are far away, / The wind that shakes the barley. // Above the uplands drenched with dew / The sky hangs soft and pearly, / An emerald world is listening to / The wind that shakes the barley. // Above the bluest mountain crest / The lark is singing rarely, / It rocks the singer into rest, / The wind that shakes the barley. // Oh, still through summers and through springs / It calls me late and early. / Come home, come home, come home, it sings, / The wind that shakes the barley.’

[Note that the song is also attributed to R. D. Joyce [q.v.] - and that, on the evidence of the dates in John Mitchel’s Jail Journal [1854] (Dublin 1861; new edn. 1913), where it is incidentally cited, does actually belong to him.]

“The Fields of France”: Jesus Christ they chased away / Comes again another day. / Could they do without Him then / His poor lost unhappy men? / He returns and is revealed / In the trenches and the field. // Where the dead lie thick He goes, / Where the brown earth’s red as a rose, / He who walked the waters wide / Treads the wine-press, purple-dyed, / Stoops, and bids the piteous slain / That they rise with Him again. // To His breast and in his cloak / Bears the younglings of the flock: / Calls His poor sheep to come home / And His sheep rise up and come. / They shall rest by a clear pool / ’Mid the pastures beautiful! // Jesus Christ they chased away / Has come back another day.

“The Foggy Dew”: A splendid place is London, with golden store, / For them that have the heart and hope and youth galore;/ But mournful are its streets to me, I tell you true, / For I’m longing sore for Ireland in the foggy dew. // The sun he shines all day here, so fierce and fine, / With never a wisp of mist at all to dim his shine; / The sun he shines all day here from skies of blue:/ He hides his face in Ireland in the foggy dew. // The maids go out to milking in the pastures gray, / The sky is green and golden at dawn of the day;/ And in the deep-drenched meadows the hay lies new,/ And the corn is turning yellow in the foggy dew. // Mavrone ! if I might feel now the dew on my face, / And the wind from the mountains in that remembered place, / I’d give the wealth of London, if mine it were to do, / And I’d travel home to Ireland and the foggy dew.

“Palestine 1917”: How strange if it should fall to you, / To me, our boys should do the deed / The great Crusaders failed to do! / To win Christ's Sepulchre: to bleed, / So the immortal dream come true. // What ghosts now throng the Holy Ground, / With rusted armour, dinted sword, / Listening? The earth shakes with the sound; / The wind brings hither a fierce word: / To arms, to arms, Sons of Mahound! // In many a quiet cloister grey / Cross-legged Crusaders, men of stone, / Quiver and stir the Eastward way, / As they would spring up and be gone / To the Great Day, to the Great Day. // Godfrey and Lion-Heart and all / The splendours of the faithful years / Watch our young sons from the Knights' stall, / Ready to clap hands to their spears / If ill befall, if ill befall. // They say: It is the Child's Crusade / Was talked of in our early Spring. / St. George, St. Denis, to their aid! / That was a boy's voice challenging, / Shrill like a bugle, unafraid! // Most wonderful, if your son, my son, / Should win the Holy Thing at last! / The might of Heathenesse be undone, / The strong towers down, the gate unfast, / Lord Christ come to His own, His own. 

See further titles at Poemhunter.com - as listed under Works - as supra.

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Prose

The Wild Harp: A Selection of Irish Poetry (London 1913), Introduction: ‘The Ireland of my young days was terribly unexacting in the matter of poetry ... Of course there was always Mangan and Ferguson, Callanan and Edward Walsh, and the best of de Vere; but these were dead or old, and Ireland was placidly accepting for poetry what was merely propagandism or heartless exercises in unsimple simplicity. These were the things we young ones were reproducing with great satisfaction up to the time when W. B. Yeats brought a new soul into Irish poetry ... What I would claim or Mr Yeats is that he established, or ateast re-established, the artistic conscience and the artistic ideal in Irish Poetry.’ (p.xiv; quoted in Dominic Daly, The Young Douglas Hyde, 1974, p.131

Peeps at Ireland (1907): ‘I have been pulled up short as many times by the reflection that all I have been saying was contradicted by some other aspect of my country people for we are an eternally contradictory people. The Englishman is simple, the Irish complex. The Anglo-Irish have grafted on to them the complexity of the Irish without their pliability. It makes perhaps the most puzzling of mixtures.’ (Quoted in Ricky LeVert, ‘The Past Really is Another Country’, review of exhibition of the travel-books collection of Ciaran McAnally [at Limerick Univ.], in The Irish Times, 21 Feb. 2011, Weekend, p.6.)

Kit (1917): ‘Oh, how glad I am that they are happy’ she said. ‘It was she he wanted all the time, not me. I knew there was some one. She is so lovely. You must know her one day and love her, Madam.’ [p.352]

W. B. Yeats: ‘Sweeping away the whole poor fabric of the facile and readymade with which the Young Irish versifiers before his day were content, and rebuilding, as she has done, the nation’s poetry. heaven knows what rubbish she has delivered us from! We were all writing like the poets of a country newspaper.’ (Quoted in Frank Tuohy, Yeats, 1976, p.37.)

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References
Justin McCarthy, ed., Irish Literature (Washington: Catholic Univ. of America 1904), gives 12 poems. Portrait by John B. Yeats in the National Gallery of Ireland.

Alan Eager, A Guide to Irish Bibliographical Material and Some Sources of Information (London: Library Association 1964) lists Twenty-five Years: Reminiscences (1913); The Middle Years (1916); The Years of Shadow (1919); The Wandering Years (1923), all autobiographical.

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Desmond Clarke, Ireland in Fiction [Pt II] (Cork: Royal Carbery 1985), lists The Love of Brothers (1919); The Man from Australia; Deny the Dreamers; Bitha’s Wonderful Year; The House in the Bogs; They Loved Greatly (1924); The Golden Rose; Kitty at School and College; The River; The Playground; Delia’s Orchard; A Lonely Maid; The Forbidden Way; Connor’s Wood; The House of Dreams (1934).

John Sutherland, The Longman Companion to Victorian Fiction (Longmans 1988; rep. 1989), calls her the 4th dg. of cattletrader with strong nationalist sympathies; sight damaged by measles; background Catholic and strict; first poems, 1878; pre-Raphaelite collection, 1885, subsidised by her father Andrew; first novel, The Way of A Maid (1895); slushy romantic fiction at a rate of 6 per annum; more serious efforts in religious verse; m. Henry Hinkson, barrister, whom she converted to Catholicism; Victorian fiction includes The Handsome Brandons (1899); She Walks in Beauty (1899). BL 94. See also Bio-note in Elaine Showalter, A Literature of their Own (1984).

A. A. Kelly [Hampton], ed., Pillars of the House, Anthology of Verse by Irish Women, 1690 to the Present (Dublin: Wolfhound 1988), takes its title from a poem by Tynan.

Seamus Deane, gen. ed., The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (Derry: Field Day 1991), Vol. 2, remarks only at 782 [Dunsany introduces Ledwidge to], & 830 [Yeats associated with ‘the poet Katharine Tynan et al.]. FDA3 selects Twenty-Five Years [416-21]; WORKS & CRIT, 558 [as supra].

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Eilis Ní Dhuibhne, ed., Voices on the Wind: Women Poets of the Celtic Twilight (New Island Books 1995), 144pp., incl. 34 of her poems, along with others by Eva Gore-Booth; Susan Mitchell; Nora Chesson Hopper; Ethna Carbery; Dora Sigerson Shorter.

Maunsel Catalogue (1915), appended as list to pop. edn. of St. John Ervine’s Mrs. Martin’s Man [1914], notices Countrymen All by Katherine [sic] Tynan, short stories of Irish people, ‘delightfully Irish’ (Morning Post),with Souris, by Fay Middleton, new author, dealing with ‘the realities of a friendship which can exist between women, two studies in feminity, one tempestuous and beautiful, the other charming and serene, now life brought peace and happiness to one, through a sea of sorrow, and how a tragic fate pursued the other, although the brightest prospects heralded the opening of her career … [a book] wherein love and passion play their accustomed part.

Collins Catalogue appended to edn. of Ervine’s The Wayward Man notices The Respectable Lady, a charming study of English village life in which ‘The respectable lady [sic] provides a startling surprise for her many admirers and is in many ways one of miss Tynan’s most interesting creations.’

Kennys Books (Cat. 2004) lists The river (London: Literary Press [1929]), 247, [5]pp., and Do., [6th Edn.] Glasgow , Sydney & Auckland: W. Collins Sons 1933), 247pp. [a story of two great loves battling against the prejudices and jealousies of Protestant-Catholic traditions]; A cluster of nuts; being sketches among my own people (London: Lawrence & Bullen 1894), 242pp.; A little book for John O’Mahony’s friends (Portland, Me.: T.B. Mosher 1909), ix, [1], 56pp. [15 cm]. orig. pb.; Denys the dreamer (London: W. Collins Sons & Co. [1920]), vi, 274pp.; Peeps at many lands: Ireland (London: A. and C. Black, 1911), 87pp., 12 leaves of pls.; maps [20 cm.]; The poems of Katherine Tynan / edited with an introduction by Monk Gibbon. Dublin: Figgis 1963), 100pp., 16 cm. [ distrib. in U.S.A. by Dufour]; Flower of youth: poems in war time [3 rd imp.] London: Sidgwick & Jackson 1917), 80pp. [ ‘First impression, June 1915; second impression, Dec. 1915; third impression, Dec., 1917’]; Louise de la Vallière: and other poems [2 nd Edn.] London: K. Paul, Trench, & Co. 1886), xii, 102, 9pp.; Herb o’ grace: poems in war-time (London: Sidgwick & Jackson 1918), 1[,] 20pp.

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Notes
Portrait: A bespectacled portrait in oil by John B. Yeats held in the Municipal Gallery of Ireland is rep. in A. N. Jeffares, W. B. Yeats: Man and Poet (London: Routledge 1949 & Edns.), pls., between pp.182-83, and captioned Katherine [sic] Tynan Hinkson.

Birthdate: the birthdate of Katharine Tynan is recorded in the relevant church records as 23rd Jan. at Irish Genealogy > records > Rathmines 1823-1886 - online; accessed 28.12.2018 [advise of Anne van Weerden].

Kith & Kin: The eldest child of the Hinksons was Godrey (b.1885); the second was Theobald Henry Hinkson (b.1897); and the third Lieutenant Giles Aylmer Hinkson (b.1899) who is listed in the National Archives (1914-1922) - presumably his military record and therefore presumably he survived World War I [WO 339/110212; online.] With the others he lived in North Kensington, Middlesex (London), and later in Buenes Aires (Argentina). A daughter Pamela [Hinkson, q.v.] was born in 1900 and died on 25 May 1982; she lived at Ealing, London; later in Dublin.

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