Edith Nesbit / Author / Poet

Edith Nesbit / Author / Poet

1858 - 1924

When Edith Nesbit was four years old, she lost her father, John Nesbit, to tuberculosis. Her mother, Sarah, twice widowed by her mid-forties, tried valiantly to run the progressive agricultural college in Kennington, London where her husband had been Principal. Overwhelmed and desperately concerned by the appearance of symptoms of tuberculosis in her second daughter, Mary, Sarah sold the college and, with it, Edith’s idylic childhood home.

During the decade that followed, Edith, Mary, her half sister, Saretta, and their mother, travelled through Britain and France in an effort to find a climate that would allow Mary to recover. Edith’s brothers, Alfred and Harry, were sent to boarding schools in England. This transient lifestyle disrupted her education woefully, although she learned to speak French proficiently and she never lost her passion for reading.

Bittersweet contentment was found after Mary died, aged just twenty, and Sarah took her remaining children to live in the tranquil Kent village of Halstead. Edith was fourteen by then and had ambitions to be a poet. She celebrated the lush beauty of the Kent countryside in the hundreds of poems, stories and novels she wrote during her lifetime. In her late teens, she moved to London with her mother but she returned to the countryside, which she missed desperately, as often as she could. Aged twenty-one and seven months pregnant, Edith married the flamboyant but serially unfaithful Hubert Bland. Both took lovers throughout their marriage and Edith, a vibrant, beautiful woman, had romantic liaisons with several younger men. Poverty provoked resourcefulness and she kept her little household afloat by designing greeting cards and writing stories for children. It was this experience of hardship and a strong belief in social justice that drove Edith and Hubert to help found the Fabian Society, a reforming socialist organisation that exists to this day.

Edith’s talent and determination brought well-deserved rewards and she moved her growing family into increasingly larger rented homes in the south east of London. By the time she could afford to rent a beautiful, rambling house in Well Hall, Eltham, she was rearing three children of her own alongside two more born to her best friend, Alice, who was having an affair with Hubert. It was in Well Hall, where she spent 22 years surrounded by orchards, farmland, and beautiful gardens that Edith began to write the wonderful stories for children that became her literary legacy. Drawing on incidents from her own childhood and the lives of her children she wrote The Story of The Treasure Seekers, The Wouldbegoods, Five Children and It and many others, including her beloved classic The Railway Children. She also wrote poetry, novels for adults and chilling horror stories.

An extravagant, generous, gregarious woman, Edith threw lavish parties at Well Hall; her guests included H.G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, Charlotte Perkins Gilman and other literary luminaries. She also organised parties and performances for the poor schoolchildren of Deptford, providing them with desperately needed toys, food and clothing. She was enormously successful for a time but wartime and the death of her husband, Hubert, coincided with a falling away of her popularity. Managing her vast house became increasingly difficult so she sold flowers, eggs and vegetables, and took in paying guests to make ends meet. In 1917, she married for a second time. Shortly afterwards, she and her new husband, a marine engineer named Tommy Tucker, moved to two refurbished army huts at St Mary’s Bay in Dymchurch in Kent. She died there in May 1924, her second husband and her children by her side.

To read more about E. Nesbit’;s extraordinary life look out for a copy of The Life and Loves of E Nesbit by Eleanor Fitzsimons (Duckworth, 2019). All are welcome to attend the launch in Hodges Figgis, Dawson Street, Dublin, on Thursday 10 October at 6pm

Thanks to Eleanor Fitzsimons for this herstory.

HARIOT GEORGINA HAMILTON-TEMPLE-BLACKWOOD, LADY DUFFERIN / Philanthropist, author, vicereine of India

Image Source: Virtual Museum of Canada

Hariot Georgina Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood, Lady Dufferin, 1843–1936

Philanthropist, author, vicereine of India

Scattered around Myanmar, India and Pakistan stood a series of hospitals bearing the name of Lady Dufferin, an Anglo-Irish heiress who married, at the age of just 19, a man who became one of Britain’s most senior diplomats, governor-general in Canada, and viceroy in India. So much more than a diplomatic wife, Lady Dufferin left a particular legacy in India through her National Association for Supplying Female Medical Aid to the Women of India, better known as the Dufferin Fund.

The Dufferins arrived in India as viceroy and vicereine in December 1884, having previously lived in Canada and in St Petersburg, where they witnessed the anarchist terror campaign and the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881. Dufferin quickly established a busy routine in India, taking lessons in Hindustani and in photography, and devoting much time to the establishment and running of her Fund. Her letters to her mother reveal her appreciation for the extent of the undertaking, and her trepidation on the occasion of the public launch: ‘I don’t in the least mind the work, but I sometimes shudder over the publicity and wish it were a quieter little affair.’ She gently but persistently pressed for funds at every opportunity, accepting donations from the Maharajas of Kashmir and Jeypore, holding a sports day and a Jubilee collection that elicited 400 pledges. The Fund doubtlessly saved lives and achieved its stated aim of alleviating the suffering of Indian women through childbirth and illness. However, it was not immune from criticism. Contemporary campaigners for equality for female doctors highlighted the Fund’s focus on zenana women to the detriment of non-zenana women, particularly lower-caste and working-class Indian women (who could not observe purdah due to the economic necessity of working outside the home).

Zenana women occupied the greater place in the minds of Victorian philanthropists and medical missionaries, who focused on the seclusion that denied them access to doctors and hospitals; Dufferin hospital boards debated issues like enclosing the buildings so that zenana women could move around freely inside without compromising their seclusion by being visible through a window, for example. Dufferin, during her time in India, remained assured of the necessity of the work by the testimony of Indian leaders who described to her the strict requirements of purdah: ‘in the harems in Scinde not even a man’s picture is admitted, much less a live doctor [...].’

She was disappointed when her husband was recalled to London, and described her tearful leave-taking on the steps of their residence. In 1907, its 23rd year, the Fund had 12 provincial branches, 140 local and district associations, and 260 hospital wards and dispensaries officered by women, who delivered care to over 2 million women and children. Working for the Fund were 48 ‘lady doctors with British qualifications,’ 90 assistant surgeons, and ‘311 hospital assistants with Indian qualifications.’ Subscriptions and donations in that year, to the UK branch alone, totalled over £4000. The Fund was very popular with colonial administrators, fundraised successfully in both India and the UK, and was popular among the Indian conservative elite.

Another important legacy of Dufferin’s initiative was its role in helping British and Irish women enter the medical profession. Zenana hospitals, for all their ethical problems, were in their early years an important source of employment for British women, who had few other opportunities to practice. The first woman to both train and qualify at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, Dr Mary Josephine Hannan, worked at the Dufferin Hospitals in Ulwar and Shikarpur in the 1890s.

Sources: Marchioness of Dufferin & Ava,Our Viceregal Life in India: Selections from my Journal( 2 vols, John Murray, 1889); ‘India’, British Medical Journal, 2, no. 2494 (29 Aug. 1908), 625; Samiksha Sehrawat, ‘Feminising Empire: the Association of Medical Women in India and the Campaign to Found a Women's Medical Service’,Social Scientist, 41,no. 5/6 (May–June 2013), 65–81 .

Research by Dr Angela Byrne, DFAT Historian-in-Residence at EPIC The Irish Emigration Museum. Featured in the exhibition 'Blazing a Trail: Lives and Legacies of Irish Diaspora Women', a collaboration between Herstory, EPIC The Irish Emigration Museum and the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.

LOLA RIDGE / Modernist poet, anarchist, labour activist

Lola Ridge, 1873–1941

Modernist poet, anarchist, labour activist

Rose Emily Ridge was born in Dolphin’s Barn, Dublin in 1873. Her medical student father died when she was three, so her mother emigrated to Australia, before moving on to New Zealand. Her mother remarried in 1880 to a Scottish miner and the family lived in a three-roomed shack on the Hokitikagold fields, among Maori and European and Chinese immigrants.

At 22, Ridge married a gold-mine manager in Kanieri, Hokitika. Their first son, born in 1896, died of bronchitis in infancy; their second, Keith, was born in 1900. In 1901 and 1902, under the name ‘Lola’, she published her first poems, ‘A Deserted Diggings, Maoriland’ and ‘Driving the Cattle Home’ in Bulletin and Otago Witness. This was a crossroads moment, when she decided to break with social convention to become an artist.

In 1903, she left her husband and took her son to her mother in Sydney, where she studied art at the Académie Julienne and wrote her first book, Verses. In 1907, her mother and stepfather both died, and she left for San Francisco. Her biographer, Daniel Tobin, understands her many migrations–from Ireland to Australia, to New Zealand, to Australia, to San Francisco, to New York City–as the means by which she reinvented herself. Before leaving San Francisco for New York in 1908, she left her son in an orphanage.

The move to New York saw the birth of Lola Ridge, modernist poet, utopian anarchist and labour activist, claiming to be ten years younger than she was. To support herself, she worked as an illustrator, factory worker, poet, and model. Her first book of American poems,The Ghetto and Other Poems, was published in 1918, and in the following year she gave a series of lectures around the Mid-West on‘Women and the Creative Will’. Throughout the 1920s, she published radical poetry in support of communism and the Soviet Union, including the poem ‘Bolshiviki’ in The New York Post Literary Review (1922), and the book Red Flag (1927). She followed her own maxim: ‘Write anything that burns you.’

Her reputation as a poet developed, and she was twice awarded the Shelley Memorial Award for Poetry (1935, 1936) and was awarded a Guggenheim Poetry Fellowship (1935). In 1927, she was arrested in Boston for protesting the execution of two anarchists. She was devoted to radical politics, and dedicated one of her poems to the Irish labour leader, James Larkin. She published five books of poems that, as a whole, deal with representing the harsh realities of life on the New Zealand goldfields and in the immigrant neighbourhoods of New York’s Lower East Side, while also attempting to reconcile her own radical politics and spirituality. This reflects her own life story, her political radicalism, and the ethereal image she shaped for herself.

A well-recognised feminist poet and modernist in her own lifetime, she has since been largely forgotten, possibly in part due to the inhospitality of mid-twentieth century America towards socialists and communists. Despite this neglect, she remains significant for the courage with which she addressed social issues in her writing and for her pivotal position among the modernist and women writers of twentieth-century America.

Sources:To the Many: Collected Early Works by Lola Ridge,ed.Daniel Tobin (Little Island Press, 2018);Light in Hand:Selected Early Poems of Lola Ridge,ed.Daniel Tobin (Quale Press, 2007); Terese Svoboda, Anything that Burns You:The Dialect of Modernism (Scheffer Press, 2016).

Research by Dr Angela Byrne, DFAT Historian-in-Residence at EPIC The Irish Emigration Museum. Featured in the exhibition 'Blazing a Trail: Lives and Legacies of Irish Diaspora Women', a collaboration between Herstory, EPIC The Irish Emigration Museum and the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.

EVA GORE-BOOTH / Suffragist, Trade Unionist, Poet, Mystic

Eva Gore-Booth, 1870–1926

Suffragist, trade unionist, poet, mystic

Eva Gore-Booth led a rich and active life beyond what might have been expected of her–not because of her gender,or her aristocratic background, but because of her physical frailty and susceptibility to illness. She collected 30,000 signatures for a suffrage petition in 1901, campaigned for the rights of women to work as barmaids and acrobats, was a member of the executive committee of the North of England Society for Women's Suffrage, and was a vegetarian and animal rights advocate. She has long been overshadowed by her more famous sister, Constance Markievicz; even in childhood,her governess recalled, Eva was ‘always so delicate ... rather in the background’.

Eva met her lifelong partner, Esther Roper in 1896 in an Italian olive grove; wordlessly, a lifelong connection was made. Roper was a Manchester suffragist and trade unionist; inspired, Gore-Booth established the Sligo branch of the Irish Women’s Suffrage and Local Government Association. In 1897,Gore-Booth left Lissadell to join Roper in Manchester, where Constance Gore-Booth got her ‘first taste of political campaigning’ when she went to help Eva and Roper in Manchester in the 1908 by-election. She also helped with Eva’s campaign in support of barmaids. In the same year, Gore-Booth published her first book of poems. Gore-Booth and Roper were a team, both believing in the need to marry trade unionism and suffrage, not least because in Lancashire, cotton factory work–and therefore union membership–was dominated by women. They were joint secretaries of the Women’s Textile and Other Workers’Representation Committee, and jointly ran the The Women’s Labour News. Together, they campaigned for pit-brow workers, florists, and barmaids, bringing large numbers of working-class women into the suffrage movement–a radical, unprecedented move.

In 1914, Gore-Booth threw herself into pacifism and the Committee for the Abolition of Capital Punishment. Despite her enduring ill-health, she travelled all over Britain with the Women’s Peace Crusade and attended the courts-martial of conscientious objectors.Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington recalled how, in the aftermath of Easter 1916, Gore-Booth travelled to Dublin to plead for leniency for the Rising’s leaders.

The historian Sonja Tiernan has done much to restore the commitment of Roper and Gore-Booth’s partnership, in every respect, to the historical record. Roper and Gore-Booth’s loving written tributes to one another bear every mark of devotion and tenderness. Roper wrote that ‘Even simple everyday pleasures when shared with her became touched with magic’. Eva, for her part, dedicated her poem ‘The Travellers’ to Roper :‘You whose Love’s melody makes glad the gloom’. In addition to their tireless work for women’s suffrage and trade unionism, Gore-Booth and Roper publicised gay and trans issues. In 1916, together with trans woman Irene Clyde, they founded the periodical Urania, publishing articles on transvestitism and advocating for a genderless society. Gore-Booth died of cancer in January 1926, in the home that she and Roper shared. In a final testament to their partnership, they are buried in the same grave.

Sources:Poems of Eva Gore Booth, ed. Esther Roper (Longmans, Green and Co., 1929);Sonja Tiernan, ed.,The Political Writings of Eva Gore-Booth(Manchester University Press, 2015);Anne Marreco,The Rebel Countess([1967] Phoenix Press, 2000);Sonja Tiernan, ‘Challenging Presumptions of Heterosexuality: Eva Gore-Booth, A Biographical Case Study’,Historical Reflections / Réflexions Historiques, 37, issue 2 (2011); ‘LGBT History Month’,https://wearewarpandweft.wordpress.com/stature-project/lgbt-history-month/

Research by Dr Angela Byrne, DFAT Historian-in-Residence at EPIC The Irish Emigration Museum. Featured in the exhibition 'Blazing a Trail: Lives and Legacies of Irish Diaspora Women', a collaboration between Herstory, EPIC The Irish Emigration Museum and the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.

NELLIE MC CLUNG / Suffragist, writer

Nellie McClung, 1873–1951

Suffragist, writer

A girl raised in the wheat belt of frontier Manitoba became Canada’s leading suffragist, the first woman to sit in the Alberta legislature, and author of sixteen volumes of fiction and non-fiction. She remains controversial, but her role in the achievement of women’s suffrage in Canada is unquestionable.

She was born in Ontario in 1873, the youngest of seven children of Irish Methodist farmer John Mooney and Scottish Presbyterian Letitia McCurdy. From an early age, she was passionate about women’s rights, objecting to male privilege, domestic abuse, and alcohol. As a teacher, she became a leader in local affairs and a member of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), the leading women’s organization of the day.

In 1896, she was obliged to retire from teaching when she married pharmacist and fellow WCTU member, Robert Wesley McClung. Robert shared Nellie’s views, but it was only thanks to hired domestic servants that she managed to juggle a busy activist life with domestic responsibilities and the care of four children; that help is acknowledged in her autobiography, The Stream Runs Fast (1945).

When the family moved to Winnipeg in 1911, Nellie found herself at the forefront of Manitoba’s suffrage and temperance movements. She founded the Political Equality League, ‘barnstormed’ Canada and the USA as one of the most popular suffrage speakers, and hosted British suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst at her home in 1911.

In January 1914, McClung and other Winnipeg suffragists attracted much publicity by holding a ‘Women’s Parliament’ in a city theatre. Women held the seats, and men had to petition for the vote.

McClung played an important role in the achievement, in 1916, of provincial suffrage in Manitoba, Alberta and Saskatchewan. It is important to note that when Ottawa completed the process of federal franchise in 1919, First Nations, Inuit and other ethnic minorities were excluded.

In 1921, McClung became the first woman MLA in Alberta, campaigning for a minimum wage for women, mothers’ pensions, and equality in divorce. However, she also supported the Alberta Sexual Sterilisation Act, that permitted the forced sterilisation of some 2,800 so-called ‘mental defectives’ up to 1972. First Nations and métis people, who made up a large proportion of the province’s population, suffered the greatest degree of harm under this law.

When McClung moved to Calgary in 1926, she lost her seat in the Alberta legislature. She remained active, however, and was part of a successful ten-year campaign for women to be recognised as ‘persons’ for the purpose of eligibility for the Canadian Senate. In 1936, she was appointed to the board of governors of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and in 1938, joined the Canadian delegation to the League of Nations.

McClung left a complex legacy. She did not tolerate fascism, National Socialism or xenophobia. This, and her lifelong support for women’s rights – including day-care, contraception, and equal wages – sits in sharp contrast to her willingness to overlook the rights of First Nations, Inuit, and métis women, and women with disabilities.

Sources: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography online edition; Nellie L. McClung, In Times Like These, ed. Veronica Strong-Boag (University of Toronto Press, 1992); Nellie L. McClung, The Next of Kin (Thomas Allen, 1917); Joan Sangster, ‘Mobilising Women for War’, in Canada and the First World War, ed. David MacKenzie (University of Toronto Press, 2005), 157–93; Yvonne Boyer, ‘First Nations Women’s Contributions to Culture and Community through Canadian Law’ in Restoring the Balance, ed. Gail Guthrie Valaskakis, Madeleine Dion Stout and Eric Guimond (University of Manitoba Press), 69–96.

Research by Dr Angela Byrne, DFAT Historian-in-Residence at EPIC The Irish Emigration Museum. Featured in the exhibition 'Blazing a Trail: Lives and Legacies of Irish Diaspora Women', a collaboration between Herstory, EPIC The Irish Emigration Museum and the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.  

Winifred Letts / Playwright, poet, novelist

Winifred M. Letts

Playwright/ Poet/ Novelist/ Nurse/ Wartime Masseuse

Manchester & Dublin

1882 - 1972

“There are two things you did as Miss Letts which are no longer appropriate, now that you are Mrs Verschoyle – attend the Arts Club on Fitzwilliam Street and swim at Seapoint Tower” the words of 67 year old William H. Foster Verschoyle,  to his new wife, Winifred Letts. At the time, Winifred (Win) was 44 years of age - a published poet, novelist, playwright and a qualified masseuse who had seen, and been through, the horrors of WWI.  And Win was a lady who knew her own mind.

At 16, she persuaded her parents to allow her to move from boarding school in the English midlands to Alexandra College, Dublin, because she had loved so much the holidays she had spent in Ireland, at her mother’s home in Knockmaroon, on the edge of the Phoenix Park. At 25, she challenged what she described as her ‘Unionist, Protestant’ upbringing by attending the Abbey Theatre and, after experiencing a performance of Synge’s ‘Riders to the Sea’, she felt inspired to start writing.

What followed were two plays that were both accepted by The Abbey, Ireland’s National Theatre.  She was only the second woman – the theatre’s co-founder, Lady Gregory having been the first - to have her work staged at the Abbey.  She went on to publish nine novels and a book of poetry throughout the following nine years. And then the first world war started.

‘The Spires of Oxford and Other Poems’, published in 1917, dealt not with the glory of war, but with the gore – Win wrote about the individuals affected by wartime horrors; the boy who gave his precious wits, the young man lying helpless in a hospital bed, the deserter shot at dawn. Win saw this reality through her work as a VAD (voluntary aid detachment nurse) and later, through her work as a masseuse, treating military personnel who had lost limbs. Her poetry predates the protest poetry of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon.   

After her marriage to William in 1926, Win moved into one of his Dublin properties, 19 Fitzwilliam Square. Win survived the gloom of town life by befriending children who lived on the lane at the back of the houses, and by spending weekends in Kildare, on William’s country estate, immersed in the beauty of nature. She was active with the Fresh Air Fund, Wild Flower Society, Irish Women Writers’ Club and many charitable organisations.

In a 1957 interview in The Irish Times, Win described herself as “a period piece, a has-been, totally unknown to this generation.” In 1969, she told Maeve Binchy that the only reason she was interesting was because she knew so many of the people Ireland then cared about. For seventy years, Win’s life and works slowly disappeared from view. Until now.

Our thanks to Bairbre O'Hogan for researching and writing up this fantastic piece.

Sources:

Portrait Gallery The Irish Times 30 Nov 1957: 10.

The Irish Times 22 April 1969.

Letts, W M Knockmaroon 1933.

Ireland of the Welcomes, July-August 1952.

https://vad.redcross.org.uk/Card?sname=letts&id=133419&last=true (accessed 01-06-2019).

JOSEPHINE HART / NOVELIST, POETRY EVANGELIST & THEATRE PRODUCER

JOSEPHINE HART

Novelist, poetry evangelist & theatre producer

1942 - 2011

Mullingar / London

“Poetry, this trinity of sound, sense and sensibility gives voice to experience in the way that no other form can.” Josephine Hart, born and raised in Mullingar, Ireland was an extraordinary and gifted woman; poetry aficionado, captivating wordsmith and artistic Director – and that’s just grazing the surface of her remarkable life.  

Born 1 March 1942, Josephine spent her early years attending a convent school at Carrickmacross, County Monagahan, where she was encouraged by the nuns to recite verse at Irish Festivals. It is here, that she admitted to discovering a great love of poetry: “I was a word child. Poets were not only my heroes, they were indeed the gods of language.” 

Josephine had a particularly tragic childhood that gave her an overt and unpleasant familiarity with death. At the age of 6, she lost her 18 month old brother, Charles. Then, when Hart was 17, her younger sister Sheila, who had been brain damaged as a result of meningitis and paralysed from the age of 2, passed away. Six months after Sheila’s death, her brother Owen was killed whilst experimenting with chemicals – leaving Josephine and her brother Diarmuid as the only remaining siblings of the Hart clan. Leading Josephine to remark, “It sounds a very strange thing to say, but when I was really young, when I was 17, I had to look at life really hard and say, ok, I will continue to live.” Josephine then stayed at the family home in Mullingar for four years, immersing herself in reading as a replacement for University, which was her original dream.

Josephine moved to London in 1964, working in telesales and studying drama at evening classes. Fantastically, much to Josephine’s delight, just like her favourite poet, T.S. Eliot, she worked in a bank for a short while. Josephine eventually moved to Haymarket Press and became the firm’s only woman director. She married her colleague Paul Buckley, and had a son, Adam. The marriage lasted 7 years, however when Maurice Saatchi came to work in the firm, he romanced Josephine. The pair had an affair and married in 1984. Maurice and Josephine had a son, Edward. 

Josephine, who became Baroness Saatchi when her husband’s Baron status was initiated in 1996, was madly in love with Maurice, and he, her. They had a private relationship that was a meeting of minds as well as passions. Ed Victor (Josephine’s literary agent and friend) commented on their relationship, “I have never seen a couple more intertwined than Maurice and Josephine.”

It was Maurice who encouraged Josephine’s creative career. Having listened to his wife complaining of the lack of poetry events in London, he suggested she started one herself – and thus, the Josephine Hart Poetry Hour was born! From 1987 onwards, Josephine organized incredible poetry readings at the British Library, occasionally visiting the National Theatre or the New York Public Library. Josephine would read about the life and work of the poet, with high-profile actors reading the verse. The Josephine Hart Poetry Hour library now celebrates 16 great poets, with actors ranging from Ralph Fiennes, to Charles Dance, to Bob Geldof to Juliet Stevenson – and beyond. Most recently, her Poetry Hour took to the Abbey Theatre in Ireland with Bob Geldof, Lisa Dwan, Sinead Cusack and Peter Campion reading W.B. Yeats to a standing ovation. All of the readings from the incredible Josephine Hart Poetry Hours can be found at thepoetryhour.com.

Josephine’s poetry collections, Catching Life By the Throat (2006) and Words That Burn (2009) were sent free of charge to all secondary schools in England. Her first two novels, Damage and Sin, were re-published as Virago Modern Classics in 2011, with Damage being adapted for film by Louis Malle, and Sin adapted by Theatre Blu.  Her other novels include, Oblivion, The Stillest Day and The Reconstructionist, which was later filmed by Roberto Ando. Her last publication was The Truth about Love, which was published in 2009. 

The award-winning The House of Bernarda Alba by Lorca saw Josephine’s West End theatre production debut. She also directed, Noel Coward’s The Vortex, Iris Murdoch’s The Black Prince and Let Us Go Then You and I at the Lyric Theatre. Josephine staged the first ever West End production of T.S. Eliot poetry. 

In 2011, Josephine was to put on a weeklong poetry event at the Donmar theatre. Without her friends having known her fight against illness, to everyone’s shock, she was absent at the opening night. She passed away on 2 June from primary peritoneal cancer, two days into the Donmar run. She died in her prime from a horrific and rare disease, all whilst remaining secretly strong – she was truly, truly remarkable and the Donmar performances will be remembered forever. Her death was a blow to literature, to her friends, but chiefly of course to her family. Her husband, Maurice Saatchi does not bother to hide or deny his grief. Five years on, he still sets a place at the table for Josephine every day ("Queen Victoria did it for Prince Albert for 42 years" he points out)

Her legacy lives through her husband’s devotion. The Josephine Hart Poetry Foundation is having great success amongst education and with their website, whilst Maurice’s Medical Innovation Bill has just been passed through government. Josephine will be remembered eternally, as will her passion, flare for life and gratification of verse. “Poetry, this trinity of sound, sense and sensibility, gives voice to experience in the way that no other art form can”.

A special thanks to Eleanor Carter, Former Director of the Josephine Hart Poetry Foundation, for this wonderful biography.

DORIS FLEESON / JOURNALIST

DORIS FLEESON

Journalist

United States

1901-1970

Known as "the tiger in white gloves," Doris Fleeson, whose father was from County Westmeath, was regarded by politicians and fellow journalists as one of the finest reporters of the age. For more than thirty years and through five presidencies she probed the workings of political power and shared her findings in clear, concise language with readers across the United States. She began her career with the New York Daily News in 1927, where, as she put it "I belonged to the "who the hell reads the second paragraph school of journalism". In 1930, Fleeson married New York Daily News colleague, John O'Donnell, with whom she had a daughter, Doris O'Donnell. In 1933, she moved to Washington to cover the presidency of Franklin D Roosevelt. She had a great rapport with the First Ladies and Eleanor Roosevelt deeply admired Doris. In 1936 Doris became the first woman journalist to cover a Presidential election campaign. In the hitherto all male world of political journalism, she experienced chauvanism and was often patronised but she would never let the system get her down.

In 1942, her marriage to John O’ Donnell ended in divorce when she disagreed with his conservative politics. During World War 2, she worked as a war correspondent in Italy and France. On her return to America, she began writing a political column for the New York Daily News, which was syndicated to 120 local papers across the U.S.A.

In 1958, Fleeson married Dan A. Kimball who was a US naval secretary from 1951 – 1953. He absolutely adored her and they enjoyed a very happy marriage together.

From Truman in 1945 to Johnston in 1967, Doris Fleeson" scolded presidents' and tried to hold the political elite to account. She won numerous Press awards and was seen by many as " incomparably the best political journalist of her time." Politicians respected her and feared being "fleesonised." A lifelong political liberal, Doris despised McCarthyism, describing it as "a flower of evil." She hated racism and sponsored the admission of a black reporter to the National Press Guild. A feminist, she supported young women journalists and set up the Womens' National Press Club.

Doris retired in 1967, having penned 5,500 columns for the Daily News. She died on August 1, 1970, aged 69, only 2 days after the death of her beloved husband.

Thanks to herstorian Ruth Illingworth for Doris’ biography. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY:
SAYLER CAROLYN; "DORIS FLEESON; INCOMPARABLY THE BEST POLITICAL JOURNALIST OF HER TIME."  2010 (University of Kansas Press)