Katharine Tynan

Life
1861-1931 [Katharine Hinkson, or Hinkson-Tynan; freq. err. Katherine]; poet and novelist; b. 21 Jan. [vars. 23 Jan.; 1 Feb.], at Whitehall dairy farm, Clondalkin, Co. Dublin; one of 12 children of Andrew Cullen Tynan and Elizabeth Reilly Tynan; ed. Dominican Convent of St Catherine of Siena, Drogheda for 6 years, to 14; suffered chronic eye ulcers in childhood; considered religious novitiate; first poem publ. in Graphic, 1878; mbr. of Ladies’ Land League, with Anna Parnell, Mrs A. M. Sullivan, et al.; contrib. poems to Irish Monthly from 1880; acted as her father’s companion; contrib. to Hibernia (Feb. 1883); Dublin University Review (Aug. 1885); first met W. B. Yeats (‘all dreams and gentleness’), June 1885, in connection with C. H. Oldham’s Dublin University Review; advised by him in early correspondence to make a speciality of her Irish Catholicism; a first book, Louise de la Valliere and Other Poems (1885), heavily influenced by Christina Rossetti (and called by Yeats ‘too full of English influence to be quite Irish’ in his review of her Ballads and Lyrics in the Evening Herald during Jan. 1892); financed by father, it ran to 2nd edns.; influenced by John O’Leary, she published a second volume, Shamrocks (1887), with exclusively Irish subject-matter; contrib. ‘Irish Authors and Poets’ to Irish Fireside, new series, No. 1 (1887, pp.8-9, and pp.24-25); her suggestion to Yeats that he should try an Irish subject resulted in Wanderings of Oisin; idolised Parnell and supported him after his downfall; lived in Ireland till marriage to Henry Albert Hinkson, 1893, a barrister and novelist and contemporary of Yeats in Erasmus Smith High School whom she converted to Catholicism, moving to Ealing and Notting Hill; later he became Mayo Magistrate from 1914 [d. 1919]; five pregnancies and three living children, of whom one survived, her dg. Pamela, with whom she later travelled; her husband, a heavy drinker, died young; published over 100 novels [var. 105 novels and 12 story collections] of social protest and poetry collections, and five vols. of autobiography valuable for recollections of figures such as Parnell; she was severely myopic; her first collection of poems, Louise de la Valliere (1885) an immediate success; revised The Cabinet of Irish Literature [after T. P. O’Connor], 4 vols. (1902-05) [vars. 1903; 1902-06] adding a predominantly women’s volume; life-long correspondent with W. B. Yeats, who described her as ‘very plain’ though always affectionate towards her; poems in Studies, 1913-22; also in Irish Review, Aug. 1913; early friendship with Dora Sigerson, Frances Wynne, and Sarah Atkinson, but reacted against 1916 Rising; devoutly religious Catholic; a sister Mary died in childhood, 1868; another, Norah (1865-1932), m. John O’Mahony; considered to have Platonic passion for Rosa Mulholland; sold Yeats’s letters to Quinn, 1920 for £100 (‘My life is in my poems’, 16 Sept. 1888); oil portrait by John Butler Yeats, 1887 [Municipal Gallery, Dublin]; wrote memoirs of the literary revival, Twenty-Five Years (1913), appearing with several dozen of Yeats’s early letters printed without permission or opportunity to correct; to be followed by The Middle Years (1916); The Years of Shadow (1919); and The Wandering Years (1922); d. 2 April; considered unique among Irish writers in her devotion to Catholicism and women’s rights; wrote 100 novels, 12 collections of short stories, 3 plays, and anthologies, all commenced after her husband’s death in 1919, as well as innumerable articles on social questions such as poor children and women’s working conditions. DNB JMC PI DBIV IF NCBE DIW DIB DIH DIL OCEL KUN FDA KUN SUTH OCIL.

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Bibliographical Details
The Wild Harp: a Selection from Irish Lyrical Poetry, printed at the Ballantyne Press, London; with decorations by C M Watts (London: Sidgwick & Jackson Ltd. MCMXIII), ded. ‘To Lady Glenconnor for Traveller’s Joy’; Pref. ix-xv; poems by Mangan, G. Fox, S. Ferguson; G. Ogle; GN Reyonds; JJ Callanan; Moore; Hyde; Darley; Nora Chesson; Edward Walsh; G. Sigerson; T. D’Arcy Magee [sic]; W. B. Yeats; A. G. Geoghegan; Boucicault; Martin MacDermott; A P Graves; S L Gwynn; Dr. Anster; Joseph Campbell; Allingham; AE; Alice Milligan; Moira O’Neill; William Dara [pseud]; James Stephens; Aubrey de Vere; Eva Gore Booth; P. Colum; Emily Lawless; Herbert Trench; Henry de Vere Stacpoole; Dora Sigerson; Seumas O’Sullivan; John Todhunter; Nancy Campbell; Winifred M. Letts; James Joyce [‘I Hear an Army’].

The Cabinet of Irish Literature/selections from the works of / the Chief Poets, Orators, and Prose Writers / of Ireland / with biographical sketches and literary notices by / Charles A. Read, FRHS / Author of Tales and stories of Irish life; Stories from the Ancient Classics, &c. / New Edition / revised and greatly Extended by / Katharine Tynan Hinkson / author of Poems, The Dear Irish Girl, She Walks in Beauty, A Girl of Galway, &c. / Vol. IV / London / The Gresham Publishing Company / 34 Southhampton Street, Strand/1903. [Completion undertaking by T. P. O’Connor.] Also, Cabinet [new edition], ed, K[atharine] T. Hinkson [formerly Katharine Tynan] (4 vol. 1902-1905) [See Belfast Linen Hall Catalogue].

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Criticism
W. B. Yeats, review of Shamrocks, in Irish Fireside (9 July 1889), rep. in John Frayne, ed., Uncoll. Prose of W. B. Yeats, Vol. 1 (Macmillan 1970), p.119-22.

Ernest Boyd, in Ireland’s Literary Renaissance (Knopf 1916).

Russel K. Alspach, ‘The Poetry of Katharine Tynan Hinkson’, in The Ireland America Review 4 (1940), pp.121-26.

Marilyn Gaddis Rose, Katharine Tynan (Lewisburg: Bucknell UP 1974) [var. 1973].

Roger McHugh, ed., Letters [of W. B. Yeats] to Katharine Tynan (Dublin: Clonmore & Reynolds; NY: McMullen 1953).

Lionel Johnson (‘Poetry and Patriotism’), rep. in Mark Story, Poetry and Ireland since 1800, A Source Book (1988), pp.93-106; p. 99.

W. B. Yeats “List of 30 best Irish Books” (Dublin Daily Express, 27 Feb. 1895).

W. P. Ryan, The Irish Literary Revival (1894), p. 117.

Dominic Daly, The Young Douglas Hyde (1974), p. 85.

Patricia Boylan, All Cultivated People (Gerrards Cross 1988).

Katie O’Donovan, reviewing Voices on the Wind, Women Poets of the Celtic Twilight (New Island Books 1995), 144pp. in Irish Times [c.10.9.1995).

Peter van de Kamp, ed., [Selected] Katharine Tynan, Irish Stories 1893-1800 (Univ. of Leiden Press 1993) [incl. ‘A Maryr Indeed’; ‘How Mary Came Home’]. Reviewed by John Devitt, ILS Spring 1994).

Henry Merritt, ‘“Willie Liar”: Yeats, A Novel, Love Poems and Three Women’, in Irish Studies Review (Winter 1994/95), pp.19-23.

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Notes
Justin McCarthy, ed., Irish Literature (Washington: Catholic Univ. of America 1904), gives 12 poems. Portrait by John B. Yeats in the National Gallery of Ireland. DIW, she was a member, when young, of the Ladies’ Land League, and followed her father [Andrew Cullen Tynan] in supporting Parnell after the Split. See also Irish Book Lover 4, 8, 9, 11, 13.

Desmond Clarke, Ireland in Fiction [Pt II] (Cork: Royal Carbery 1985), lists The Love of Brothers (1919); The Man from Australia; Deny the Dreamers; Bitha’s Wonderful Year; The House in the Bogs; They Loved Greatly (1924); The Golden Rose; Kitty at School and College; The River; The Playground; Delia’s Orchard; A Lonely Maid; The Forbidden Way; Connor’s Wood; The House of Dreams (1934). NOTE also Eager, Twenty-five Years, Reminiscences (1913); The Middle Years (1916); The Years of Shadow (1919); The Wandering Years (1923), autobiographies.

John Sutherland, The Longman Companion to Victorian Fiction (Longmans 1988; rep. 1989), calls her the 4th dg. of cattletrader with strong nationalist sympathies; sight damaged by measles; background Catholic and strict; first poems, 1878; pre-Raphaelite collection, 1885, subsidised by her father Andrew; first novel, The Way of A Maid (1895); slushy romantic fiction at a rate of 6 per annum; more serious efforts in religious verse; m. Henry Hinkson, barrister, whom she converted to Catholicism; Victorian fiction includes The Handsome Brandons (1899); She Walks in Beauty (1899). BL 94. See also Bio-note in Elaine Showalter, A Literature of their Own (1984).

A. A. Kelly [Hampton], ed., A. A., Pillars of the House, Anthology of Verse by Irish Women, 1690 to the Present (Dublin: Wolfhound 1988), takes its title from a poem by Tynan.

Seamus Deane, gen. ed., Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (Derry: Field Day 1991), Vol. 2, remarks only at 782 [Dunsany introduces Ledwidge to], & 830 [Yeats associated with ‘the poet Katharine Tynan et al.]. FDA3 selects Twenty-Five Years [416-21]; WORKS & CRIT, 558 [as supra].

Eilis Ní Dhuibhne, ed., Voices on the Wind: Women Poets of the Celtic Twilight (New Island Books 1995), 144pp., incl. 34 of her poems, along with others by Eva Gore-Booth; Susan Mitchell; Nora Chesson Hopper; Ethna Carbery; Dora Sigerson Shorter.

Maunsel Catalogue (1915), appended as list to pop. edn. of St. John Ervine’s Mrs. Martin’s Man [1914], notices Countrymen All by Katherine [sic] Tynan, short stories of Irish people, ‘delightfully Irish’ (Morning Post),with Souris, by Fay Middleton, new author, dealing with ‘the realities of a friendship which can exist between women, two studies in feminity, one tempestuous and beautiful, the other charming and serene, now life brought peace and happiness to one, through a sea of sorrow, and how a tragic fate pursued the other, although the brightest prospects heralded the opening of her career … [a book] wherein love and passion play their accustomed part.

Collins Catalogue appended to edn. of Ervine’s The Wayward Man notices The Respectable Lady, a charming study of English village life in which ‘The respectable lady [sic] provides a startling surprise for her many admirers and is in many ways one of miss Tynan’s most interesting creations.’

Kennys Books (Cat. 2004) lists The river (London: Literary Press [1929]), 247, [5]pp., and Do., [6th Edn.] Glasgow , Sydney & Auckland : W. Collins Sons 1933), 247pp. [a story of two great loves battling against the prejudices and jealousies of Protestant-Catholic traditions]; A cluster of nuts; being sketches among my own people (London: Lawrence & Bullen 1894), 242pp.; A little book for John O'Mahony's friends (Portland, Me.: T.B. Mosher 1909), ix, [1], 56pp. [15 cm]. orig. pb.; Denys the dreamer (London: W. Collins Sons & Co. [1920]), vi, 274pp.; Peeps at many lands: Ireland (London: A. and C. Black, 1911), 87pp., 12 leaves of pls.; maps [20 cm.]; The poems of Katherine Tynan / edited with an introduction by Monk Gibbon. Dublin : Figgis 1963), 100pp., 16 cm. [ distrib. in U.S.A. by Dufour]; Flower of youth: poems in war time [3 rd imp.] London : Sidgwick & Jackson 1917), 80pp. [ ‘First impression, June 1915; second impression, Dec. 1915; third impression, Dec., 1917']; Louise de la Vallière: and other poems [2 nd Edn.] London : K. Paul, Trench, & Co. 1886), xii, 102, 9pp.; Herb o' grace: poems in war-time (London: Sidgwick & Jackson 1918), 1 20pp.

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Princess Grace Irish Library (Monaco)