Life
1849-1882 [Frances Isabel; var. 1854]; 8th of 11 children; gdg. of Admiral
Stewart (Old Ironsides) and favorite sister of Charles Stewart Parnell;
ed. privately; first poem appeared in The Irish People, May 1864,
signed ‘Aleria’; also wrote for The Nation, Irishman,
et al.; cared for wounded soldiers in Siege of Paris; travelled to America
with her mother and settled at Bordenstown on death of her father (d.1869);
suffered poor health from 1874; confidante and host to Michael Davitt;
fnd. American branch of Women’s Land League, 1881, simultaneously
established in Ireland by Anna Catherine; set up collections in American
for Irish famine victims; issued Hovels of Ireland (1879), a pamphlet
attacking Irish landlords; also Land League Songs (1882), in which
"Hold the Harvest", a ballad compared with "La Marseillaise;
contracted mysterious disease; d. 18 July, at Bordenstown, NY (aetat.
33), her funeral attende dby John Howard Parnell but not her br. Charles,
who refused to allow her body to be shipped to Ireland (‘Wherever
you die you should be buried’); bur. family vault, Cambridge; memorial
in stone from Avondale raised to her at Mt. Auburn by Seán O hUiginn,
Irish Ambassador to America, 2001. DNB JMC DBIV DIH MKA OCIL
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Criticism
W. P. Ryan, The Irish Literary Revival: Its History, Pioneers
and Possibilities (London: Paternoster Steam Press 1894), p.9, 29.
Frank Callanan, The Parnell Split (Cork 1992?), reviewed by Robert Kee, in Irish Times (5 Dec. 1992).
Máire Toibin [Parnell Summer School}, Irishwoman’s Diary, Irish Times ([q.d.] May 2001).
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Notes
Justin McCarthy, gen. ed., Irish Literature (Washington:
Catholic Univ. of America 1904), selects "Post Mortem", "Hold
The Harvest", and "Erin My Queen".
John Cooke, ed., The Dublin Book of Irish Verse (Dublin: Hodges Figgis 1909) gives bio-dates 1855-1883; and selects "After Death" [‘Shall mine eyes behold thy glory, O my country? / ... When the nations ope for thee their queenly circle, / as a sweet new sister hail thee, / Shall these lips be sealed in callous death and silence / that have known but to bewail thee?’].
Brian McKenna, Irish Literature, 1800-1875: A Guide to Information Sources (Detroit: Gale Research Co. 1978), cites Land League Songs (Boston 1882); The Hovels of Ireland (NY: T Kelly 1879); contrib. Irish People. See David James O’Donoghue, ‘The Literature of ‘67’, in Shamrock, 30 (1893).
Robert Hogan, ed., Dictionary of Irish Literature (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan 1979), follows DNB in assigning bio-date 1854; Hickey and Doberty (Dict. of Irish History, 1980) give 1849; sic Roy Foster, Modern Ireland (1988).
There is a port. of Fanny, posed half-profile waist to
head, in National Library of Ireland [printed in History Ireland,
Summer 1994, p.33).
W. B. Yeats retells in A Vision Mrs Parnell’s description of a stormy night on Brighton Pier: ‘she lay still, stretched upon his two hands, knowing that if she moved, he would drown himself and her.’ (Cited in Drew Milne, review of Maria Di Battista & Lucy McDiarmid, eds., High and Low Moderns: Literature and Culture, 1889-1939, OUP 1996, in Irish Studies Review, Dec. 1998, p.341.)
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Princess Grace Irish Library (Monaco)