Ellen O’Leary: A Bold Fenian Poet

Ellen O’Leary (1831–89) From Katharine Tynan, Twenty-Five Years: Reminiscences (New York: Devin Adair, 1913) 232.

Mary Ann McCracken, Matilda Tone, “Eva,” “Mary,” “Speranza,” Anna and Fanny Parnell, Maud Gonne, Constance Markiewicz: these names, spanning the late eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries, resonate today within the narrative of Irish nationalism. Less familiar are those women of the Fenian movement who supported the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) of the 1860s. This essay seeks to retrieve and reconstruct an elusive portion of Irish political and literary history by focusing on Ellen O’Leary (1831–89), who contributed to Fenianism, but like so many other women nationalists, has been noted, if at all, for her relationship to a man. As the sister of John O’Leary, the IRB leader who became an early mentor of W.B. Yeats, Ellen O’Leary has long existed in the historical record as a footnote to discussions of her brother. Recent recovery work by Irish feminist historians and critics, however, has begun to move the sister out of the male shadow. Versions of her writing have been included in several major anthologies such as The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, Volumes 4 and 5: Irish Women’s Writing and Traditions and Pillars of the House: An Anthology of Verse by Irish Women from 1690 to the Present. By retrieving Ellen O’Leary’s original political and poetic contributions to The Irish People in the 1860s, this essay explores not only the contributions O’Leary made to Fenianism, but also the subsequent erasures of her voice.

This retrieval and contextualization of O’Leary’s Fenian poetry belongs to the larger project of feminist recovery exemplified by the 2002 publication of volumes 4 and 5 of The Field Day Anthology. Gerardine Meaney, one of the volumes’ general editors, describes the challenge of fitting nineteenth-century Irish women’s writing—much of it political—into established patterns of English literature; she notes that an aim of the project was “to generate new critical paradigms as well as recover lost texts” (17). Whatever “critical paradigm” O’Leary’s poetry might fit into, a further retrieval of her “lost texts” originally published in the IRB newspaper The Irish People should change our view of republican women’s political and literary activities in nineteenth-century Ireland. Ellen O’Leary’s writing suffered a double erasure: her political poetry in the Fenian newspaper was either substantially revised or omitted altogether from her later volume of collected poems, Lays of Country, Home and Friends (1890); additionally, that publication, like other volumes produced by women poets, has been, until recent feminist recovery work, consigned to literary and critical oblivion. A double loss, therefore, requires a double retrieval. O’Leary’s original Fenian poems not only underwent significant alteration for Lays of Country, Home and Friends, but later collections, including The Field Day Anthology, reproduced that edited version of her poetry. The task, therefore, is not only to recover O’Leary’s verses as they originally appeared in The Irish People, but also to explore the reasons for their later exclusion from literary history. By raising key issues involved with such literary retrieval—concerning, for example, the traditions within which newly discovered works might belong—Margaret Kelleher contextualizes this particular act of recovery:

[T]he questions which now face researchers in women’s literature extend, therefore, beyond the writings we are retrieving (and the still valuable and perplexing question of why they were lost) to our understanding of literary history itself. What concepts of literary access, production and influence are operating within the current project of retrieval? To what tradition or understanding of tradition are previously neglected writings being returned?

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Where should we place work such as O’Leary’s in relation to canonical texts? David Lloyd’s discussion of “minor” literature offers a starting point. For Lloyd, minor literature both “emulates but does not fully attain the qualities of a canonical literature,” and also “remain[s] in an oppositional relationship to the canon . . . from which...