Writer - Photographer

Katharine Tynan - First Lady of The Irish Revival

 

During her lifetime, Katharine Tynan penned 3 plays, numerous collections of short stories, six volumes of autobiography, three volumes of biographies, 27 volumes of poetry and more than 100 novels. Best known for her ballad The Wind that Shakes The Barley, her work was inspired largely by Irish heritage, nationalism and Catholicism, and throughout the Irish Revival (a major movement of cultural nationalism in Ireland), she was the leading female exponent, making her one of Ireland's most influential and eminent female writers. 

Katharine Tynan was born, the fifth of twelve children, to Andrew Tynan and his wife Elizabeth on 23rd January, 1861 (some sources say 1859), in Clondalkin, Dublin. A bright child, she could read by the age of three, throughout her youth she was plagued with eye ulcers which left her purblind. In 1871, she was sent to the Dominican Convent of St Catherine of Siena, Drogheda, where she remained a student until 1874, when her father requested her to return home.

Andrew Tynan was a nonconforming Catholic who staunchly supported Parnell's campaign for Home Rule. Katharine shared his political convictions, joining the Ladies Land League and later becoming the first literary editor of the Parnellite, Irish Daily Independent.

Her first poem, A Dream, was published in Graphic Magazine in 1878, and was followed by a substantial list of poetry publications in Irish Monthly, Hibernia and the Dublin University Review. In 1884, she fell in love with Oxford graduate Charles Fagan, who also wrote poetry. Sadly, Charles died the following year and, leaving Katharine heartbroken, she poured her grief into writing poetry.

Much of her early work was influenced by English Catholic writers such as the mystical Christina Rossetti and the aesthetic Alice Meynell, and when Tynan's first collection of poems, Louise de la Vallière and Other Poems, was published in 1885 it was hailed by some as 'too English.' Nevertheless, the book earned her critical acclaim and on the back of its success Katharine's father furnished a literary salon for her at Clondalkin to which flocked many of Ireland's literary giants including John O' Leary, A. E. Russell and W. B. Yeats.

Katharine forged a lifelong friendship with Yeats and they worked together to produce his Poems and Ballads of Young Ireland (1888).  She was the first to review his work and Yeats, in return, bestowed abundant praise on her second collection , Shamrocks (1887). The anthology  used exclusively Irish subject matter and contained one of the earliest attempts to make use of Ossianic material inAnglo-Irish poetry.  

It's believed Yeats proposed to Tynan in 1891, unaware that she was secretly engaged to Henry Albert Hinkson, with whom he had attended Dublin high school. Hinkson and Tynan were married in 1893, and the couple moved to Ealing, London.

Following the tragedies of a stillborn child in 1894, and the death of a baby, Godfrey, in 1895, Katharine gave birth to three children; Theobold (1897), Giles (1899) and Pamela (1900). 

In 1891, Katharine's Ballads and Lyrics was published, followed in 1898 by The Wind in the Trees. Ballads and Lyrics took Ireland, Celtic legends and Catholic tradition as its themes while Wind in the Trees, a celebration of nature, is considered her finest book.

Her husband edited a book of verse by members of Trinity college, penned several mundane historical novels and in 1902 he received a law degree. But in spite of this he found it difficult to secure regular employment and out of need to feed her family Katherine began writing a series of novels including The Sweet Enemy (1901), and The Adventures of Alicia (1906). Both books were written primarily for women and their themes embraced women's rights and social injustice.

Also at that time she produced biographies, travelogues, countless reviews and discursive articles on women's working conditions and impoverished children.  By 1908, her annual income was more than £60, 000 per year.

She returned to Ireland in 1911, when Hinkson became magistrate of Ballinrobe, Mayo, producing a number of popular wartime songs and poems including A Woman Commends her Little Son. The poem, an Irish mother's plea to a host of heavenly guardians to watch over her boy,  may have its origins in Katherine's own anxieties during WW1;  her sons both saw active service in Gallipoli and France.

Henry Hinkson died suddenly in 1919, and Katharine moved to Dublin before travelling to France and Germany, finally settling in a flat in Wimbledon, London. From there, her eyesight failing and with her daughter, who was finding success as a novelist under the pseudonym Peter Deane, acting as an extra pair of eyes she continued to write a stream of articles on marriage, love and the decay of morals until on 2nd April, 1931, she suffered a cerebral thrombosis and sadly passed away. 

Shortly before her death a book of her Collected Poems was published. W. B. Yeats turned down the offer to write the forward but A.E. Russell obliged describing her as 'the earliest singer of the Irish Renaissance.'

In recent years Katharine Tynan's work has seen her hailed as a champion of the feminist cause but she is, perhaps, best remembered as a poet who celebrated life, love, simplicity, nature and tradition.

 

© John Rooney 2011