WINIFRED M. LETTS (1882-1972): The Writer I Knew

Bairbre O’Hogan My interest in the poet, novelist, dramatist and superb children’s writer, Winifred M. Letts, is more of a personal interest than an academic one. I would like her to be rediscovered for herself – not just to claim a stake in literary…

Away with the Fairies: Irish Folklore and Fin-De-Siècle Motherhood in Katharine Tynan’s Ballads and Lyrics (1891)

Sadbh Kellett, University of St. Andrews  The Irish writer Katharine Tynan was remarkable in her personal and literary embodiment of the ‘New Woman’. An educated member of Dublin’s Catholic middle-class, Tynan’s formidable literary career resulted in her financial independence, which she maintained alongside her…

Research Pioneers 5: Lucy Collins

Lucy Collins’ Poetry by Women in Ireland: A Critical Anthology 1870-1970, published by Liverpool University Press in 2012, has made a crucial intervention in the field of Irish women’s literary history. As one reviewer described it, it reveals ‘a hitherto hidden history of poetry’…

An Appreciation of Winifred Letts

“An Appreciation of Winifred Letts” [1] Dr. David Clare, Mary Immaculate College, UL   Winifred Letts was born in Salford, in what is now Greater Manchester, in 1882 to an English vicar father and an Irish mother. As a child, she greatly enjoyed the…

“A good English factory-girl”: the erased Irishness of nineteenth-century poet Fanny Forrester in Ben Brierley’s Journal

Dr Suz Garrard Twenty-first century newspapers and media outlets have unparalleled power to not only shape the narratives surrounding superstructural subjects such as immigration, but to construct the social, political, and national identities of the individuals they represent. The power of the media to…

Mary Ann Allingham: An Introduction

by Dr. Niamh Hamill MARY ANN ALLINGHAM 1820-1836 Will any one read my preface? (thought I to myself, as I sat down one evening with my Crow quill dipped in Indian ink in my fingers ready to begin an introductory page to my Friends ….