Life
1865-1951; b, Fenagh, Co. Antrim, a Presbyterian, became nationalist;
moved to Rathmines with family, 1880s, ed. TCD; degrees in pol. Sci. and
law; hermetic Society, with AE; Rented a farmhouse and stored guns for
IRA at Temple Hill, Co. Wicklow; spent World War I in Achill; active in
republican movement in Dublin, prior to 1916; hid in Connemara after;
remained in Dublin during Civil War; travelled to US in 1925, and settled
in San Francisco/Berkeley [Bay Area], lectured at University of California;
poetry and children’s stories; founded Red Hand Magazine, Sept
1920; died in California; Flowering Dusk (1945) is an autobiography. DBIV
IF DIL.
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Works
Poetry, Poems [Tower Press Booklet
No. 4] (Dublin: Maunsel & Co. 1906) [DIL 1904]; Seed of the Pomegranite,
Oceano 9 (priv. 1949) poems [20 copies only]; Smoke of Myrrh, [Oceano
?10] (1950) [25 copies]; The Rose of Heaven, (Dublin: Colm O’Lochlainn,
1918), Do., another ed. [same publisher] (The Candle Press, 1920),
poems; The Weird of Fionavar (Dublin: Talbot/London: T. Fisher
Unwin 1922), poems.
Autobiography, Flowering Dusk (NY: Longmans 1945).
Fiction, The Coming of Lugh (Maunsel & Co. 1905), tales; Do., another ed. (1909); ). Celtic Wonder Tales (Dublin: Maunsel & Co 1906); The Wonder-Smith and His Son, tales (London: Longmans 1927); [?ed.], The Tangle-Coated Horse (Dublin: Maunsel 1929) [based on Fionn cycle]; The Unicorn with Silver Shoes, tales (NY: Longmans 1932) [freely based on Irish myth of the son of Balor, unicorn, djinn, &c.]; Celtic Legends (Leicester: Coll. of Arts and Crafts 1935) [14 tales from Irish mythology]. Also, ‘An Ancient Doctrine’ [on fairy faith]; in Irish Review (Aug. 1912). COMM, Padraic Colum, Ella Young, An Appreciation (Lon&NY: Longman 1931).
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Notes
Robert Hogan, ed., Dictionary of Irish Literature (1979), ‘The
Unicorn [&c]. take great liberties with figures out of Celtic
myth in telling the adventures of the son of Balor, a unicorn who is calmed
only by listening to epic poetry, a djinn who ends up in a Dublin zoo,
and a mischeivous Pooka. In the gentle irony which gives this book a refreshing
freedom from sentimentality, the Unicorn with silver shoes rmeains one
of the outstanding examples of the lyrical cadences of the Irish imagination’
(M Kelly Lynch). SEE also under Countess Markievicz [on founding of Bean
na h-Eireann].
Dublin Book of Irish Verse, no bio-dates; ‘Cleena’ (‘.. Mournful wind, your grief cannot avail her ..’); ‘The Wind from the West’ (‘Blow high, blow low,/O wind from the west:/You come from the country/I love the best’); ‘My Lady of Dreams’; ‘A Dream-garden’ (‘.. I’ll light the way before you/With a rainbow-gleam’). BIBL, ‘Celtic Mythology’ by Ella Young, Irish Year Book (Sinn Féin [c.1919]), pp.249-264.
Margaret Ward, ed., In their Own Voice: Women and Irish Nationalism
(Dublin: Attic 1996), reprints Ella Young’s memoir of work in Dublin
slums with Inghinidhe na hÉireann [q.pp.].
Belfast Central Public Library holds Celtic Wonder Tales, retold by Ella Young, ill. and decorated by Maud Gonne (Maunsel 1910, rep. Floris Book Club, Edin. 1988), 210pp, contains ‘Earth-shapers’, ‘Spear of Victory’, ‘A Good Action’, ‘Sons of Gobhaun’, ‘Cow of Plenty’, ‘Coming of Lugh’, ‘Eric-fine of Lugh’, ‘Great Battle’, Inisfail’, ‘Golden Fly, ‘Children of Lir, ‘Lucky Child’, ‘Conary Mor’.
‘I see her standing with W. B. Yeats, the poet, in front of Whistler’s Miss Alexander in the Dublin gallery where some pictures by Whistler are astonishing a select few. These two people delight the bystanders more than the js pictures. Everyone stops looking at canvas and manoeuvres himself or herself into a position to watch these two. They are almost of equal height. Yeats has a dark, romantic cloak about him; Maud Gonne has a dress that changes colour as she moves. They pay no attention to the stir they are creating; they stand there discussing the picture. / I catch sight of them again in the reading room of the National Library. They have a pile of books between them and are consulting the books and each other. No one else is consulting a book. Everyone is conscious of those two as the denizens of a woodland lake might be conscious of a flamingo, or of a Japanese heron, if it suddenly descended among them. / Later, in the narrow curve of Grafton Street, I notice people are stopping and turning their heads. It is Maud Gonne and the poet. She has a radiance as of sunlight. Yeats, that leopard of the moon, holds back in a leash a huge lion-coloured Great Dane - Maud Gonne’s dog, Dagda.’ (Quoted in Conor Cruise O’Brien, ‘Talk of the Town’, review of The Gonne Letters, ed. A. N. Jeffares and Ann Macbride White, Norton 1992, in Atlantic Monthly, Jan. 1993, pp.117-21.)
Ella Young, confidante of Maud Gonne and Yeats’s bête noir, who
‘talks elementary text books all day, when she is let, with an air of
personal inspiration’, according to a letter of Yeats. See R. F. Foster, Life of Yeats: Vol. I: ‘The Apprentice Mage’ (1997).
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Princess Grace Irish Library (Monaco)