Mary Tighe

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Standard Name: Tighe, Mary
Birth Name: Mary Blachford
Married Name: Mary Tighe
Pseudonym: Psyche
Among the oeuvre of MT , Irish poet of the early nineteenth century, her long narrative allegory, Psyche, gives her a high place among the women Romantics. Her known oeuvre has excitingly expanded in recent years. She also kept a diary (now lost) and drafted a novel (unfinished).
Half-length stipple engraving of Mary Tighe by Edward Scriven, derived originally from a painting by George Romney,published 1812. Tighe is seated, with long, flowing, dark hair, a ribbon round her head, and a simple gown that crosses over at the bust.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
death Edmund Spenser
Spenser's early women readers who were also poets seem to have included An Collins and Alicia D'Anvers . Later women writers in English either found him useful for raising the status of the romance genre...
Friends, Associates Thomas Moore
His social circle included prominent literary women: Mary Tighe , sisters Lady Morgan (Sydney Owenson) and Olivia Clarke , Mary Shelley , Marguerite Blessington , Louisa Stuart Costello , and Caroline Norton . He knew...
Friends, Associates Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan
Sydney Owenson formed a lasting friendship with the poet Mary Tighe . In connection with the publishing of her second novel, she met the London publisher Richard Phillips and others in his circle, including William Godwin
Friends, Associates Anna Seward
AS became a close friend of Lady Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby , the Ladies of Llangollen, whom she called the Rosalind and Celia of real life.
Wordsworth, Jonathan. The Bright Work Grows: Women Writers of the Romantic Age. Woodstock Books, 1997.
96-7
For years they regularly exchanged gifts...
Friends, Associates Lady Eleanor Butler
Among their many visitors (apart from the local gentry, with whom they duly established links), close friends included Anna Seward , Henrietta Maria Bowdler (who wrote mock-flirtatiously of LEB as her veillard [sic] or old...
Friends, Associates Barbarina Brand, Baroness Dacre
Her many literary friendships, maintained in part by correspondence, included those with Joanna Baillie and Mary Russell Mitford (who first met each other in her drawing-room), Catherine Fanshawe , and Mary Tighe (with whom she...
Intertextuality and Influence Mary Russell Mitford
MRM introduces each canto with Spenserian stanzas, suggesting that she may already have read Mary Tighe 's Psyche. Her poem takes as its starting point a discovery reported in England in February 1810: of...
Intertextuality and Influence Emma Parker
Fitz-Edward, set in Wales, has poems interspersed, besides the lines of verse heading its chapters, which include the work of Anna Letitia Barbauld , Mary Robinson , Mary Tighe , and EP herself, cited as Emma De Lisle.
McLeod, Deborah. The Minerva Press. University of Alberta, 1997.
Intertextuality and Influence Elizabeth Strutt
ES balances her story of love and adventure with the depiction of everyday life in a Scottish castle, including food, clothing, pastimes, heraldry, and chivalric tournaments,
Stevens, Anne. “Tales of Other Times: A Survey of British Historical Fiction, 1770-1812”. Cardiff Corvey: Reading the Romantic Text.
in the reign of Edward III . Her preface...
Leisure and Society Elizabeth Jenkins
In wartime lunch hours EJ used to browse in the bookshops of Tottenham Court Road: among items for sale she noticed Susan Ferrier 's The Inheritance, 1824, and one of the fifty privately-printed...
Literary responses Felicia Hemans
Its appearance in Blackwood's was accompanied by critic John Wilson 's assertion, Scotland has her Baillie —Ireland her Tighe —England her Hemans.
Hemans, Felicia. “Introduction”. Records of Woman, edited by Paula R. Feldman, University Press of Kentucky, 1999, p. xi - xxxiii.
xvi
James Hogg , another contestant, praised the poem.
Hemans, Felicia. “Introduction”. Records of Woman, edited by Paula R. Feldman, University Press of Kentucky, 1999, p. xi - xxxiii.
xvi
Literary responses Felicia Hemans
Appreciation of FH was slowly growing. Following on the positive responses from Scott and Byron , in October 1820John Taylor Coleridge in the influential Quarterly Review (published by John Murray , her own publisher)...
Textual Features Mary Russell Mitford
MRM 's letters regularly indulge in analysis of books. She comments on works by both men and women, in English and French, and her opinions shift a good deal with age. She reacted with horror...
Textual Features Anne Plumptre
She aims, she says, at accuracy . . . impartiality . . . . fidelity,
Plumptre, Anne. Narrative of a Residence in Ireland. Henry Colburn, 1817.
v-vi
and hopes this book will arouse a deeper interest than that about France, since it concerns an object so...
Textual Production Mary Russell Mitford
MRM next entertained the desire to write a grand opera on the topic of Cupid and Psyche, for music to be composed by Weber . In canvassing other treatments of the subject, she made no...

Timeline

1801
Thomas Moore pseudonymously published his mildly erotic Poetical Works of the Late Thomas Little Esq.