Life
1772-1810; b. Co Wicklow; dg. Rev William Blachford, a keeper of [Narcissus]
Marsh’s Library, and his wife, a founding-member of Irish Methodism;
unhappily married to her cousin Henry Tighe, MP, of Woodstock, Co. Kilkenny;
issued Psyche, or the Legend of Love Psyche (privately published
1805; 3rd edn. 1811), long narrative poem based on Apuleius and written
in Spenserian stanzas which is said to have influenced John Keats’s
Endymion; enjoyed successful career in literary society; died of
tuberculosis at Woodstock, spurring further reprints; Woodstock vacated
by the family during WWI, when Capt. Tighe met his death in an accident
in London ‘never properly explained’ (acc. Hubert Butler); the
house was occupied by the Black & Tans in 1920, and burnt after they
retired in 1922; effigy on a white marble sofa by Flaxman is enclosed
in the mausoleum at Inistioge; portrait by George Romney (1805), commonly
bound with editions of Psyche. RR CAB DIW MKA
RAF OCIL
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Works
Psyche; or, the Legend of Love (London [privately pub.] 1805);
Psyche, with Other Poems by the late Mrs. Henry Tighe (London:
Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, & Browne 1811, 1812; 5th edn. 1816), xv,
311 [1]pp., front. port.; Psyche: With Other Poems (Philadelphia:
J. & A. Y. Humphreys 1812), x, 230pp., and Do. [Early American
Imprints, 2nd series] (Microform 1977); Psyche, or the Legend of Love
and Miscellaneous Poems (q pub. 1852); Do. facs. rep. with
new intro. by Jonathan Wordsworth [3rd edn. 1811] (Oxford: Woodstock Books
1992), xv, 314pp., port., 21cm.; William Tighe, ed., Mary: A Series
of Reflections During Twenty Years (London 1811); The Works of
Apuleius Comprising the Metamorphoses, or Golden Ass, The God of
Socrates, The Florida, and His Defence, or A Discourse on Magic; A New
Translation, to Which Are Added, a Metrical Version of Cupid and Psyche,
and Mrs. Tighe’s Psyche, a Poem in Six Cantos [Bohn’s Classical Library
series] (London: G. Bell [1853], 1878, 1888, 1889), ix, 533pp., [1]p.,
pl. ill.
William Smyth (1765-1849), English Lyricks (Dublin: printed by Hugh Fitzpatrick 1806), [2], iv, [2], 79pp., [1]p., 1 plate, 8vo. [17.8cm.], with dedicatory poem by William Parnell addressing Mrs Tighe in which he speaks of ‘the destruction of the business of printing’ in Ireland by the Act of Union and addresses calls ‘the present work [...]a small effort towards restoring the Irish press to some degree of consequence’ (Liverpool 1797).
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Criticism
Richard Ryan, Biographia Hibernica, Irish Worthies
(1821), Vol. II, p.593.
Elizabeth Casey Blackburne, Illustrious Irishwomen (1877); Catherine Jane Hamilton, in Notable Irishwomen (Dublin 1904).
Ernest R. McClintock Dix (Irish Book Lover, 1912), refuting the theory of the first printing of Psyche at Rosanna.
Seamus Ó Casaidhe, notice in Irish Book Lover (1916), citing bibliog. notice in Bolster’s Quarterly Magazine, (Aug. 1828).
Earle Varle Weller, Keats and Mary Tighe, The Poems of Mrs Tighe; with Parallel Passages from the Works of John Keats (NY: Century Co. 1928), xxiv, xv, 333pp.
Patrick Henchy, The Works of Mary Tighe, Vol VI, No. 6, Journal of the Bibliographical Society of Ireland (Dublin: Three Candles Press 1957).
Victoria Glendinning, ‘Mary, Mary Quite Contrary’, in Irish Times (7 March 1974), [q.p.].
Patrick Rafroidi, Irish Literature in English, The Romantic Period, Vol 1 (1980), p.211.
W. B. Stanford, Ireland and the Classical Tradition (IAP 1976; 1984), p.92, remarks on long and pallid [sic] poem Psyche (1805), and Flaxman’s memorial.
Hubert Butler, ‘Beside the Nore’, in The Sub-Prefect Should Have Held His Tongue (Dublin: Lilliput Press 1990), pp.29-34; pp.32ff. Note, Butler’s essay is used by P. J. Kavanagh in Voices in Ireland (London: Murray 1994), p.156-57, as the basis for an account of the Tighe family and their house.
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Notes
Thomas Moore, “To Mrs. Henry Tighe, on
reading her - Psyche”: ‘TELL me the, witching tale again, /
For never has my heart or ear / Hung on so sweet, so pure a strain, /
So pure to feel, so sweet to hear. // Say, Love, in all thy prime of fame,
/ When the high heaven itself was thine; / When piety confess’d the
flame, / And even thy errors were divine; // Did ever Muse’s hand,
so fair, / A glory round thy temples spread? / Did ever lip’s ambrosial
air / Such fragrance o'er thy altars shed? // One maid there was, who
round her lyre / The mystic myrtle wildly wreath’d - ; / But all
her sighs were sighs of fire, / The myrtle wither’d as she breath’d.
// Oh! you, that love’s celestial dream, / In all its purity, would
know, / Let not the senses’ ardent beam / Too strongly through the
vision glow. // Love safest lies, conceal'd in night, / The night were
heaven has bid him lie; / Oh! shed not there unhallow’d light, /
Or, Psyche knows, the boy will fly. // Sweet Psyche, many a charmed hour,
/ Through many a wild and magic waste, / To the fair fount and blissful
bower / Have I, in dream , thy light foot trac’d! // Where'er thy
joys are number'd now, / Beneath whatever shades of rest, / The Genius
of the starry brow / Hath bound thee to thy Cupid’s breast; // Whether
aliove the horizon dim, / Along whose verge our spirits stray, / Half
sunk beneath the shadowy rim, / Half brighten’d by the upper ray,
- // Thou dwellest in a world, all light, / Or, lingering here, dost love
to be, / To other souls, the guardian bright / That Love was, through
this gloom, to thee; // Still be the song to Psyche hear, / The song,
whose gentle voice was given / To be, on earth, to mortal ear, / an echo
of her own, in heaven.’ Moore’s note adds: ‘See the Story
in Apuleius. With respect to this beautiful allegory of Love and Psyche,
there is an ingenious idea suggested by the senator Buonarotti, in his
Osservazioni sopra alcuni frammenti di vasi antichi ..He thinks
the fable is token from some very occult mysteries, which had long been.
I celebrated in honour of Love; and accounts, upon this supposition, for
the silence of the more ancient authors upon the subject, as it was not
till towards the decline of pagan superstition, that writers could venture
to reveal or discuss such ceremonies. Accordingly, observes this author,
we find Lucian and Plutarch treating, without reserve, of the Dea Syria,
as well as of Isis and Osiris; and Apuleius, to whom we are indebted for
the beautiful story of Cupid and Psyche, has also detailed some of the
mysteries of Isis. See the Giornale di Litterati d’Italia,
tom. xxvii. articol. 1. See also the observations upon the ancient gems
in the Museum Florentinum vol. i. p.156. I cannot avoid remarking here
an error into which to French Encyclopédistes have been led by
M. Spon, in their article Psyche. They say “Pétrone fait
un récit de la pompe nuptiale de ces deux amans (Amour et
Psyche). Déjà, dit-il, &c., &c.” The Psyche
of Petronius, however, is a servant-maid, and the marriage which he describes
is that of the young Pannychis. See Spon's Recherches curieuses, &
Dissertat. 5. 2.’ [Incls. futher notes on allusions in Tighe,
e.g., explaining that ‘the Platonists expressed the middle state
of the soul between sensible and intellectual existence’ by the image
of the sun along the horizon, ‘half sunk’/‘half brighten’d’.]
(Moore, Poetical Works, 1848 Edn., p.79.)
Anne Stewart, National Portrait Collection (NGI Diary 1986), writes: ‘Thomas Moore, who admired Mary Tighe’s Psyche, thought success had turned her into an intellectual: “One used hardly to get a peep at her blue stockings, but now I am afraid she shows them up to her knee.” Tighe described her portrait by George Romney (1805) as “pretty, but perfectly pallid among the high-coloured Lady Hamilton’s and Mrs Tickells [...]. I wonder how it came to be so pale [...] as if a pretty woman had wept herself pale and sick.”’ (q.p.)
W. B. Stanford, Ireland and the Classical Tradition (1984 edn.), mentions the ‘long and pallid [sic] poem Psyche’, and passes further comments on Flaxman’s memorial in the same vein (p.92.)
Anthologies: Andrew Ashfield, ed., Romantic Women Poets 1770-1838 (Manchester UP 1995), includes “The Charm of Poetry”, an extract
from Psyche (here 327pp.) Andrew Carpenter, ed., Verse in English
from Eighteen-Century Ireland (Cork UP 1998) reprints “The Lake
of Killarney”. See also Jerome McGann, The New Oxford Book of
Romantic Period Verse (1993).
Charles Teeling (History of the Rebellion of 1798: A Personal
Narrative, 1828 Edn.) quotes words addressed to the House of Parliament
by Henry Tighe regarding the laws and their execution in Ireland in the
period of the United Irishmen’s Rebellion: ‘The laws which had been
enacted in this country two or three years back, had been of so severe
and arbitrary a cast, as to have rendered the constitution almost a name.
But the manner in which those laws had been executed was still more severe
than the laws themselves [...]. In severity of legislation, they had exceeded
any nation in Europe; but in severity of execution they had exceeded even
the severity of that legislation.’ (Ftn., p.187.
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Princess Grace Irish Library (Monaco)