Helen Selina Blackwood [Lady Dufferin]

Life
1807-1867 [Lady Dufferin, née Sheridan]; author of “I’m sitting on my Stile, Mary”; dg. of Thomas Sheridan and dg of [Miss] Callander; gdg. of RBS, b. London; m. Captain Price Blackwood, 4 July 1825, lived in Italy for 2 years under disapproval of his family; often separated by his naval career; 2nd m. Earl of Gifford (becoming Countess of Gifford); pseud. Honourable Impulsia Gushington; dg. Thomas Sheridan, s. Caroline Norton and Duchess of Somerset; 4 brothers; accompanied Thomas and wife to S. Africa, alone of siblings; saw Napoleon strolling in garden at St Helena on return journey, after death of father; Lispings from Low Latitudes [pseud. “The Hon. Impulsia Gushington”], prose (London 1863); To My Dear Son, verse (1861), which includes verses by Tennyson; her plays The Fine Young English Gentleman, satirising English pretensions in Ireland, and Finesse or a Busy Day in Messina, a 3-act comedy, were both performed at Haymarket Theatre in 1811 during the managership of John where Buckstone; A Selection of the Songs of Lady D, ed. her son; married the Earl of Gifford on her death-bed; she died of breast cancer. CAB JMC DNB MKA DIW RAF FDA OCIL

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Works
To My Dear Son, on his 21st Birthday (c.1861, priv.); Songs, Poems, and Verses (London: John Murray 1894), ed. with memoir by her son the Marquess of Dufferin and Ava; A Selection of the Songs of Lady Dufferin, set to music by herself and others (London: John Murray 1895), edited by her son.

A Selection of the Songs of Lady Dufferin, Set to Music by Herself and Others (1895), incls. “Sweet Kilkenny Town” [‘I was workin’ in the fields near fair Boston City / Thinkin’ sadly of Kilkenny ... ]; “The Emigrant Ship” [‘where a hundred thousands welcomes shall be for evermore!’; “The Lament of the Irish Emigrant” [‘I’m sitting on my stile, Mary ... The red was in your lips, Mary / The lovelight in your eye’]; “Katey’s Letter”, and “The Bay of Dublin”, et al.

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Criticism
in Catherine Jane Hamilton, ‘Helen, Lady Dufferin’, in Notable Irishwomen (Dublin: Sealy, Bryers & Co. 1904). See also Harold Nicholson, Helen’s Tower (London: Constable 1937), ill.

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Notes
Brian McKenna, Irish literature, 1800-1875: a Guide to Information Sources (Detroit: Gale Research Co. 1978), cites ‘Helen’s Tower’, Clandeboye, by Alfred Lord Tennyson [with] To My Dear son on his 21st Birthday (Clandeboye, private ca. 1861).

Chris Morash, The Hungry Voice (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan 1989), selects “Lament for the Irish Emigrant” from Songs, Poems and Verses (London: John Murray 1894).

Seamus Deane, gen. ed., Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (Derry: Field Day 1991), Vol. 2 selects "The Irish Emigrant" from Songs and Poems and Verses [103]; notes her down among 100 poets remembered for one lyric [3]; popular stylised sentimentality of "The Irish Exile" [Deane, ed.; 67]; part of a repertoire that is one of the many cultural manifestations of the tortuous negotiations between Gaelic and English modes of civilisation that remain central to the island’s history [ibid.; 77]; BIOG as supra [114].

Belfast Public Library holds Lispings; also Blackwood, [ed.,] H. S., Poems, Songs and Verses (1895). Note that Lispings shares or echoes the title of a collection by Francis Davis (publ. Belfast).

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Helen’s Tower in Co. Down was built by Lord Dufferin in honour of his mother, with a bronze tablet bearing lines written by Alfred Lord Tennyson: ‘Helen’s Tower, here I stand, / Dominant over sea and land, / Son’s love built me, and I hold / Mother’s love in lettered gold. / Love is in and out of time, / I am mortal stone and lime [...]’.(Quoted in P. J. Kavanagh, Voices in Ireland, 1994, p.28.)

Ulster dead: The monument to Ulster dead at Albert on the Somme is modelled on Helen’s Tower; see Brian J. Graham, ‘No Place of the Mind: Contested Protestant Representation of Ulster’, in Ecumene: Journal of Environment, Culture, Meaning, 1.3 (1994), p.273.

Young love: Lord Dufferin wrote of her second marriage: ‘In justice to herself, to him [Gifford] and to his parents, she thought it necessary to obtain from the doctors a formal assurance that her recovery was impossible.’ (Dufferin, 1895, p.93); Dufferin claims that her work was frequently published under her sister Caroline’s name at the request of her first husband.

F. J. Bigger, in a cutting held at the Belfast Linenhall Library, calls her authoress of “The Bay of Dublin”, with remarks, viz., née Helen Sheridan; Frederick Blackwood, Dufferin and Ava, Viceroy of India, her only son, very affectionately attached to her, considered her to have a unique love of nature. She wrote “I’m sitting on the stile, Mary ..”, and “The Irish Emigrant” [‘The red was in your lips, Mary, / The lovelight in your eye.’]

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Princess Grace Irish Library (Monaco)