Life
?1798-1874; b. Faha, nr. Kilanena, Co. Clare; became renowned as a healer;
lived mostly at Kilbarron, nr. Feakle, Co. Clare; m. four times; accepted
gifts rather than money; power reputedly derived from fairies; began healing when
a son suffered a bout of illness caused by fairies; priest threw her dark-blue
bottle [var. black], allegedly given to her by fairies [to her son], into Kilbarron Lake
at her death; was consulted by Prince of Wales; bur. Feakle in unmarked
grave; figures significantly in folklore work of Lady Gregory and W. B.
Yeats. DIH
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Criticism
Edmund Lenihan, In Search of Biddy Early (1987); see also Bryan
MacMahon, a play, The Death of Biddy Early (q.d.); Meda Ryan, Biddy
Early, Wise Woman of Clare (Mercier Press 1978; rep. 1984, 1991).
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Notes
She is an important topic in Lady Gregory’s
Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland (2 vols. 1920)
Biddy Early is referred to in Yeats’s The Shadowy Waters (l.15), and annotated as ‘a famous wtich in Co. Clare’ in A. N. Jeffares, A New Commentary on the Poems of W. B. Yeats (1984, p.441); see also Yeats’s Autbiographies, p.401.
W. B. Yeats quotes Biddy Early’s saying, ‘There is a cure for all evil betweeen the two mill-wheels of Ballylee’, in Celtic Twilight (1893), rep., in Mythologies, p.22.
It is reported by tradition that Biddy Early contrived the burning down of a landlord’s house when he threatened to evict her, all remaining being his foot; received her bottle from her son who won it playing hurling with the fairies (see Irish Times report on Ronald Schuchard, lecturing at the Yeats Summer School, Sligo, 1995; Irish Times, 10 Aug. 1995).
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Princess Grace Irish Library (Monaco)