Mary Devenport O'Neill

Mary Devenport O'Neill (1879-1967). Courtesy Sheela-na-Gig aka Jeanne Rathbone.

Mary Devenport O'Neill (August 3, 1879 - 1967) was an Irish poet and playwright.

Life

Youth and education

In 1898, when Mary Devenport was 19 and took her place in the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art, her father was marked as deceased in the college records. He had been a Royal Irish Constabulary sub-constable in Loughrea, co. Galway, where Mary was born in 1879. The school record gives her address as the Dominican Convent, Eccles Street, Dublin, with a secondary address of Sea Road, Galway.

The DMSA waived Devenport’s fee because her family did not earn in excess of £200 a year. She trained there as an art teacher for 4 years, and also completed a summer course in 1907, the year before she married.

During her time at the school, her widowed mother Delia and sister Annie moved from Galway to Ranelagh, Dublin. Although there is only scant information on her early life, the Galway landscape and its people retained an imaginative presence in her poetry which often cites locations around the county.

The formative years of Devenport’s life were spent living in the convent on Eccles Street. The convent holds incomplete records from these years but many young women were given accommodation while they completed 3rd-level education. While research has not uncovered any written record of her reflections during this time, the influence and philosophy of the Dominican Order played a prominent role in the lives of their students. The convent opened in 1882 as an orphanage for middle-class girls who had fallen on hard times and although this remit had changed by the time Devenport lived at the convent in the 1890s, the ethos of educating girls whose “families were neither poor enough to accept only a national school education for the girls in the family, nor rich enough to afford further education in a boarding school or fee-paying day school” continued to be the school’s focus.

By entering 3rd-level education in Ireland in 1898, Devenport was part of the initial wave of women to achieve this educational standard through an entirely Roman Catholic educational system.

Dublin was a small and politically volatile city where a literary career could either be founded or frustrated because of alliances and affiliations. The DMSA provided a fertile breeding ground for the Irish cultural revival of the early-20th century and it was here that connections were made between many of the pivotal figures of Devenport’s social milieu.

Devenport’s social connections were numerous; for example, she attended the DMSA with 16-year-old Estella Solomons, who later went on to become a renowned Impressionist artist and social activist. Their names appear on the same page of the entry register. In 1926Solomons married Seamus O’Sullivan, editor of The Dublin Magazine, and the couple had a “deep and lasting friendship” with Æ. This connection is just 1 of many which characterize the context of Devenport’s literary and artistic life in Dublin.

When Devenport attended the school, design classes for women were focused on lace-making and embroidery. Her eye for color and her close observation of nature may be a consequence of this training in attention to fine detail. Women were taught in separate classrooms from their male peers, and their education had a practical focus.

Marriage

While she was attending college, Devenport “began a correspondence with Joseph O’Neill whose poetry in the Freeman’s Journal she had admired,” and they married in 1908 when she was 29. He was a Galway-born Irish scholar who had studied in Manchester and Freiburg before leaving his studies to join the Department of Education as an inspector of primary schools: “He was appointed Permanent Secretary of the Department of Secondary Education in 1923 and remained in this position until his retirement in 1944”.

Also a poet and author of 5 novels, he often wrote under various pseudonyms including “Oísin”, “Michael Malia” or the Irish version of his name “Séosamh Ó Néill.” His 1st verse-play, The Kingdom-Maker (1917), was written in collaboration with Devenport who contributed the lyrics as well as a pencil-sketch of her husband.

His position as a senior civil servant placed the couple at the center of elite political and literary life in Ireland from the 1920s to the 1940s.

During the 1920s Devenport and her husband bought a home at 2 Kenilworth Square, Rathgar, Dublin, where they started a Thursday evening literary salon. Dublin had a circle of established salons, which they called at-homes, and a series of small publications whose editors were part of this social circle. The O’Neills’ salon was attended over a period of years by all of the major literary figures of the time including George Russel (Æ), Jack B. and W.B. Yeats, Sibyl le Brocquy, Lennox Robinson, and Austin Clarke. In 1920s and 1930s Dublin, this social interaction was critical for the exchange of new ideas in the newly formed Irish Free State.

A regular visitor to her salon, Yeats developed a significant friendship with Devenport, who was 14 years his junior, while he was writing A Vision. Yeats’s biographers, Hone and Jeffers, mention his connection with the O’Neills, Hone stressing that in the 1920s Yeats “had formed an intellectual bond with Joseph O’Neill ... and with Mrs. Joseph O’Neill, both of whom had been at more pains than most to discover what he was driving at in A Vision” Yeats’s notebooks from 1921 testify that he discussed his ideas for A Vision with Devenport, making note that “Mrs Joseph O’Neill has set the following question in A Vision”. This is followed by a series of numbered paragraphs where he works out his system of cycles for this work.

Writers’ memoirs of the time give a vivid account of salons and many mention Devenport as part of the literary scene. Austin Clarke, poet and founder of the Lyric Theatre Company, gives a lucid description of Æs’ at-homes around the year 1917, mentioning Devenport and her husband. His memoir bears vivid testament to the virtual invisibility of women of this era as artists although they made substantial contributions to contemporary literature.

Clarke corresponded regularly with Devenport during the years 1929 to 1948, and his Lyric Theatre Company produced 2 of her plays.[6] Devenport’s letters record her involvement with Clarke’s production of her work with a focus on combining choreography with verse.

While other memoirs of this period fail to mention Devenport in any context, they reveal bickering and rivalry within this social circle of the creative elite. Novelist Frank O’Connor remembers Irish scholar Osborn Bergin falling out with Joseph O’Neill at one of these gatherings. Writing of Bergin’s sensitivity towards an imagined slight by Yeats, O’Connor goes on to mention the O’Neills:

But his greatest rancor was reserved for his old friend Joseph O’Neill, a good Celtic scholar, who had been a fellow student of his in Germany. O’Neill – one at least of whose donnish romances will be remembered – married a literary woman, who – again according to Bergin – was always talking of “Péguy and Proust” and getting the pronunciation wrong – a major offense in anyone but an intimate friend."

Literary career

In 1920, when Æ mentioned Devenport in a letter to O’Neill, she was 41 and actively writing. He signed off: “Kind regards to Mrs. O’Neill who I imagine is typing up a storm of ... ideas for her collection”.

However, apart from writing the lyrics for her husband’s play 10 years after she married when she was 38, Devenport did not publish until 1929 when she was 50. Her volume of poetry, Prometheus, and other poems, comprising 33 lyric poems, 4 “dream poems”, a long poem, and a verse-play, was published by Jonathan Cape.

Devenport then regularly published her poetry and verse-plays, mostly in The Dublin Magazine, over a period of 20 years.

In 1933, her verse-play Bluebeard was performed as a ballet-poem in the Abbey Theatre choreographed by Ninette de Valois, who also worked on 3 of Yeats’s plays for the Abbey. 15 years later, in 1948, it was produced by Austin Clarke's Lyric Theatre Company. In the same year it was broadcast on The Dublin Magazine Programme on Radio Éireann. Devenport’s 1944 letters mention an earlier production of her Bluebeard by Lara Payne which may have been an amateur performance.

Devenport’s verse-play Cain was published in The Dublin Magazine in 1938 and translated into Czech as Kain in 1939. In 1944 Cain was broadcast on Radio Éireann and the following year it was produced by the Lyric Verse Speaking Company on the Peacock stage.

In 1947 Out of the Darkness was published in The Dublin Magazine and, 2 years later, on 17 October 1949, Devenport’s final play, War: The monster was performed by the Abbey Experimental Theatre Company on the Peacock Stage. War was unpublished and the play-script is not currently extant.

She also contributed reviews to The Bell and The Irish Times.

Later life

Devenport left Dublin with her husband when she was 70. The O’Neills moved to Nice in 1949, selling their house in Kenilworth Square and all of their possessions. O’Neill revealed his reasons for the move in a letter to R.I. Best: “I’d give my eyes to be back in Dublin but the doctors all warned me that another winter in Dublin would be the death of me and when you’re dead you’ve lost everything.” However, the movie was a disaster and O’Neill wrote a poignant letter shortly after their arrival:

I’ve smashed a knee cap and at my age, a knee cap does not cure. I’ll never walk or write again. At times I wish I was dead, but, if I go, my pension goes with me and my wife will be on the rocks, for we never saved a penny and I’m not insured. Today for the first time I realized that I’ll never walk again, a most horrible thought.

Although none of Devenport’s letters from this period have yet been uncovered, a letter from her husband to a friend conveys her continuing literary ambitions at that time, when he writes: “My wife says she intends going on with her work of writing till she’s a hundred. If she does notch the hundred and I die en route she’ll be in a bad way, for I never insured”.

None of Devenport’s work was published after the move to France. She spent her last days living with relatives in Dublin and died in 1967, aged 88.

Writing

Her work shows the influence of imagism and displays a modernist cynicism towards Revival themes. She refuses heroic imagery to adopt a feminist approach to masculine narratives. Her collection Prometheus, and other poems were the 1st collection of poetry published by an Irish poet, (besides William Butler Yeats) which could be considered modernist. She is one of a small number of known early 20th century Irish modernist women poets.

Recognition

Her work is all out of print and does not appear in many of the numerous anthologies of Irish verse.

Publications

Poetry

• Prometheus, and other poems. London: Cape, 1929.
• also published, “Three Poems’, Irish Statesman 4 (Aug. 1, 1926), p.650; “Dead in the Wars and in Revolutions”, Dublin Magazine 16 (Winter 1941), p.7; “Scene-shifter Death”, Dublin Magazine 19 (Spring 1944), p.40; “Valhalla”, Dublin Magazine 19 (Winter 1944), p.3; “Lost Legions”, Dublin Magazine 24 (Spring 1949), p.16.

Plays

• The Kingdom-Maker: A play in five acts (with Joseph O'Neill). London: T. Fisher Unwin; Dublin: Talbot Press, 1917.
• “Cain”, Dublin Magazine 13 (Spring 1938), pp.30-48 [verse]; “Out of Darkness”, Dublin Magazine 22 (Summer 1947), pp.20-39; "The Visiting Moon," Dublin Magazine 23 (Spring 1948), pp.35-46 [verse]. Also King Lear’s Daughter [q.d.]
• Bluebeard, in The Only jealousy of Emer, and other plays (edited by Oisín Kelly). Dublin: Lyric Theatre Company, 1948.

Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy WorldCat.

See also

• List of Irish poets

References

• Biography, Mary Devenport O'Neill. Web, July 7, 2018. Works cited:
  • Armstrong, Tim. Modernism: A cultural history. Cambridge: Polity, 2005. Print.
  • Brown, Terence. Ireland: A xocial and cultural history, 1922-1985. London: Fontana, 1985. Print.
  • Clarke, Austin. A Penny in the Clouds: More memories of Ireland and England. London: Routledge & Kegan, 1968. Print.
  • Coulter, Riann. “A Meeting of Minds: Russell, Solomons and O’Sullivan.” Irish Arts Review 23.1 (2006): 100–105. Print.
  • Ferriter, Diarmaid. The Transformation of Ireland, 1900-2000. London: Profile, 2004. Print.
  • Hogan, Robert. Dictionary of Irish Literature. London: Greenwood Press, 1996. Print.
  • Hone, Joseph M. W.B. Yeats, 1865-1939. London: Macmillan & Co, 1942. Print.
  • Hufton, Olwen. The Prospect Before Her: A history of women in Western Europe, 1500-1800. New York: Vintage, 1998. Print.
  • Kealy, Máire M. Dominican Education in Ireland, 1820-1930. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2007. Print.
  • Kelly Lynch, M. “The Smiling Public Man: Joseph O’Neill and his works.” Journal of Irish Literature 12 (1983): 3–72. Print.
  • O’Connor, Frank. An Only Child and My Father’s Son: An autobiography. London: Penguin, 2005. Print.
  • O’Neill, Joseph. “Letters to R.I.Best.” N.d. MS11003(1). N.L.I.
  • Turpin, John. A School of Art in Dublin Since the Eighteenth Century: A history of the National College of Art and Design. Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1995. Print.

External links

Poems

• 4 poems by O'Neill: "October Afternoon in Bad Kreuth in Bavaria," "The Shortest Day," "October Afternoon in Dublin," "Summer 1924"
• Dream Poems: "Dante," "Marcel Proust," "The Full Moon," "The Cooked Slice of Bread"
• 34 Poems

About

• Mary Devenport O'Neill at the Princess Grace Irish Library
• Mary Devenport O'Neill at Ricorso
• Mary Devenport O'Neill Official website.

This article uses Creative Commons-licensed text (CC BY-SA 4.0) from the Mary Devenport O'Neill website. The original article is at Biography"

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