Henrietta Boyle, Mrs. John O'Neill. Portrait att. to William Hoare (1707-1792). Courtesy ArtUK.
Henrietta, Lady O'Neill (1758 - 3 September 1793) was an Irish poet, hostess, and patron of the arts.
Life[]
Youth[]
O'Neill was born Henrietta Boyle, the only child of Charles Boyle (1728–59), Viscount Dungarvan (son of John Boyle (qv), 5th earl of Cork and Orrery), and his wife, Susannah (1732–83), daughter of Henry Hoare of Stourhead, Wiltshire, England.[1]
Her father died when she was young and her mother, whom Horace Walpole in 1776 described as mad, married Thomas Brudenell (1729–1814), 1st earl of Ailesbury, and had 4 more children.[1]
Adult life[]
Henrietta married (18 October 1777) John O'Neill of Shane's Castle, Antrim, MP for Randalstown (1761–83) and descendant of the O'Neills, former high kings of Ireland.[1] The couple had 2 sons – Charles Henry St. John O'Neill, 1st earl O'Neill, and John Bruce Richard O'Neill, 3rd baron O'Neill,[2] born in 1779 and 1780 – and a daughter.[1]
After the birth of her children, Henrietta became a leader in the social and artistic circles of Antrim. A dedicated amateur actress, she had a theatre installed in Shane's Castle and wrote an epilogue for a performance of Cymbeline in which she acted with Lord Edward Fitzgerald in the early 1780s.[1]
In 1785 she took the role of a sylph in a play in Shane's Castle and wrote and delivered a Popeian epilogue. That year she also arranged for the visit to Belfast of the great tragic actress, Mrs Siddons, who duly reported that Shane's Castle inspired recollections of an ‘Arabian nights’ entertainment.[1]
O'Neill was accounted an excellent amateur actress in her obituaries, but William Drennan noted that ‘it is really singular that she should like playing when she is so totally devoid of all theatrical talent’ (Drennan–McTier letters, i, 256).
Her obituary in the Anthologia Hibernica of October 1793 called her "a lady whose elegance of mind could only be surpassed by the charms of her person: uniting with the polish of courts the brilliancy of genius, she shone pre-eminent in the fashionable world."[3] However, Drennan wrote in 1786, with considerable asperity, that ‘her manners are those of a finished courtesan, and I suppose the manners to be a pretty close transcript of the morals. If she be honest she's a devilish cheat’ (Drennan–McTier letters, i, 252).[1]
During her visits to her house in London in Cavendish Square O'Neill befriended novelist Charlotte Smith, for whom she wrote her celebrated ‘Ode to the poppy’, originally published in Smith's novel Desmond (1792).[1]
From about 1791 O'Neill's health deteriorated, necessitating visits to Portugal;[1] in September 1791 she was described as having "lately returned from Portugal in perfect health."[3]
She died at the Caldas de Rainha near Lisbon on 3 September 1793. She was buried in the English cemetery in Lisbon, near the grave of Henry Fielding. Gossip rumoured that she had died of an opium overdose, but there is little proof of this.[1]
Writing[]
The Anthologia Hibernica (1793) termed O'Neill's ‘Ode to the poppy’ ‘perhaps the most beautiful lyric production of the age’ (319–20). It is a fine paean to the opiate qualities of the ‘soul-soothing plant! that can such blessings give’ and caused essayist, Leigh Hunt to speculate that Smith and O'Neill regularly took opium together.[1]
Smith described her death as a ‘deprivation which has rendered my life a living death’ (Lonsdale, 458) and reproduced ‘Ode to a poppy’ and another poem, ‘Written on seeing her two sons at play’, in her Elegiac sonnets (1797). These are among the few surviving instances of O'Neill's poetry.
See also[]
References[]
- Bridget Hourican, O'Neill, Henrietta, Dictionary of Irish Biography, October 2009. Web, Oct. 20, 2022.
Notes[]
- ↑ 1.00 1.01 1.02 1.03 1.04 1.05 1.06 1.07 1.08 1.09 1.10 Hourican (2009).
- ↑ Henrietta O'Neill, Geni.com. Web, Mar. 17, 2017.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 "Henrietta O'Neill (Boyle)," Eighteenth Century Women Poets: An Oxford anthology (edited by Roger H. Lonsdale), Oxford University Press, 1990. Google Books, Web, Mar. 17, 2017.
External links[]
- Poems
- About
This article incorporates text from the Dictionary of Irish Biography, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 4.0 International license. Original article is at: O'Neill, Henrietta
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