Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Katharine Tynan
-
Standard Name: Tynan, Katharine
Birth Name: Katharine Tynan
Nickname: Kate
Nickname: K. T.
Nickname: Katie
Married Name: Katharine Hinkson
Married Name: K. T. Hinkson
Married Name: Mrs H. A. Hinkson
The busy writing career of Irish nationalist poet, novelist, and journalist KT
spanned the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, driven partly by the need to support her family. Her more than 160 volumes include about a hundred novels (written primarily for women, many of them romance and some gothic), twenty-seven volumes of poetry (some of it inspired by Irish heritage, nationalism, and Catholicism), twenty-three collections of short stories, six volumes of autobiography, three volumes of sketches, a religious play, a book of axioms, and three volumes of biography or memoirs of other people.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray, Brian Harrison, and Lawrence Goldman, editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
Napier, Taura S., and Louise S. Napier. Seeking a Country: Literary Autobiographies of Twentieth-Century Irishwomen. University Press of America, 2001.
53
She selected and edited three poetry collections and a massive volume of Irish literature, all of them important in the Irish Literary Revival, which she helped to produce. Her non-fiction covers Irish history, work for children (including a religious text and a book on behaviour), and a collaboratively written book on flowers. As a journalist she turned out articles and sketches on social, political, and gender issues. She kept an unpublished diary, and a journal of the Great War.
"Katharine Tynan" Retrieved from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tynan1.jpg.This work is licensed under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0) Public Domain Dedication license. This work is in the public domain.
Yeats felt that Katharine Tynan
's inclusion of three poems by Joyce in her Irish anthology The Wild Harp in 1913 gave a material boost to his career.
Hinkson, Pamela. “The Friendship of Yeats and Katharine Tynan, II: Later Days of the Irish Literary Movement”. The Fortnightly, No. 1043 n.s., pp. 323 - 36.
332
Cultural formation
Hannah Lynch
HL
grew up as an urban middle-class Irishwoman with some Scottish heritage and amid nationalist influence, in a cultivated literary and political household which was also a predominantly female environment. It is described in Twenty-Five...
Family and Intimate relationships
Dora Sigerson
George Sigerson
, DS
's father, was a doctor specialising in nervous disorders (a new area of research), a poet, and a Gaelic scholar. He lectured on biology at the National University of Ireland
...
Family and Intimate relationships
Dora Sigerson
DS
's sister, later Hester Sigerson Piatt
, married the Gaelic poet and playwright Donn Piatt
in about 1900, having been introduced to him by family friend Katharine Tynan
. It seems that the couple...
Family and Intimate relationships
Lady Cynthia Asquith
Cynthia's uncle George Wyndham
was a Conservative politician (named Secretary of State for Ireland in 1900), an author, and a personal friend of the writer Katharine Tynan
.
Family and Intimate relationships
Mona Caird
His father, Sir James Caird
(an agricultural economist and large landowner in south-west Scotland, knighted in 1882), had at some date (probably connected with inheritance) linked his own surname with that of his wife, born...
Family and Intimate relationships
Alice Meynell
She bore eight children, of whom one died in infancy. As the family grew, financial worries forced her to work unceasingly. Katharine Tynan
was godmother to Olivia
, born in 1890, and Francis Thompson
was...
Fictionalization
Amy Levy
Quite apart from the biographical errors perpetrated by James Warwick Price
, other myths about her were woven from her Jewishness and her suicide. Her friend Clementina Black
(perhaps feeling that her reputation needed rescue)...
Fictionalization
Alice Meynell
To many of her contemporaries (especially male contemporaries), AM
symbolised the perfection of Woman and Mother. Many descriptions of her suggest Woolf
's Mrs Ramsay in To the Lighthouse. Coventry Patmore
and Francis Thompson
Friends, Associates
Viola Meynell
During 1913 to 1914, VM
became close friends with Gladys Parrish Huntington
(who in 1915 was to publish Carfrae's Comedy) through a common friend, Ivy Low
.
MacKenzie, Raymond N. A Critical Biography of English Novelist Viola Meynell, 1885-1956. Edwin Mellen, 2002.
110-11, 113
Soon afterwards, while doing war...
Friends, Associates
May Sinclair
She had an extremely strong sense of privacy. Though at first she was pleased by the suggestion of an American journalist, Witter Bynner
, that he should interview her, and though she liked him when...
Friends, Associates
Sarah Grand
While living in Tunbridge WellsSG
met the poet, popular novelist, and Irish nationalist Katharine Tynan
.
Tynan, Katharine. The Middle Years. Constable, 1916.
380
Friends, Associates
Christina Rossetti
In the 1880s CR
became acquainted with her admirer Katharine Tynan
, whose verse she in turn liked for its piety. Lisa Wilson
, an admirer of CR
who herself wrote and painted, approached the...
Friends, Associates
Naomi Royde-Smith
Another close friend of NRS
, J. D. Beresford
, a highly-regarded novelist, was also an important friend to Dorothy Richardson
, and a mentor and support to Macaulay as well as Royde-Smith, and such...
Friends, Associates
Dora Sigerson
DS
met Irish-nationalist poet and novelist Katharine Tynan
, with whom she shared a lifelong friendship.
Tynan, Katharine, and Dora Sigerson. “Dora Sigerson: A Tribute and Some Memories”. The Sad Years, Constable, 1918, p. vii - xii.
viii
Timeline
July 1889
Women's Suffrage: A Reply appeared in the Fortnightly Review to counter Mary Augusta Ward
's Appeal Against Female Suffrage in the previous month's Nineteenth Century.
1890
The year following Irish nationalist Ellen O'Leary
's death from breast cancer on 15 October 1889, her Lays of Country, Home and Friends (many of them political) were collected and published.
1895
Thomas Bird Mosher
of Portland, Maine, began publishing The Bibelot. A Reprint of Poetry & Prose for Book Lovers, a monthly series later collected as an annual volume, of exquisitely produced editions in tiny press-runs.
November 1908
Bean na h-Eireann (whose title means Woman of Ireland) began publishing in Dublin as the organ of the nationalist group Inighnidhe na h-Eireann
, Daughters of Ireland.