About Katharine Tynan
Katharine Tynan (born January 21, 1859 — died April 2, 1931) was an Irish poet and writer who lived in London for a time and was a significant figure of the Irish Literary Renaissance. Her memoirs and her poetry, influenced by the Catholic faith, were of great importance. Having suffered from nearsightedness due to an eye ulcer in her childhood, her first poem appeared in the newspaper “The Graphic” in 1878, and she subsequently published poems regularly in journals and magazines such as the “Irish Monthly”, “Hibernia”, and, from 1880 to 1885, in the “Dublin University Review”. She also worked as a journalist for some literary magazines. Her first book, “Louise de la Vallière and Other Poems” (1885), was heavily influenced by the British poet Christina Rossetti and was therefore described by Yeats as “too full of English influence to be quite Irish.” Besides her relationships with Yeats and Christina Rossetti, she also maintained friendships with Charles Stewart Parnell, Alice Meynell and her husband Wilfrid Meynell, as well as Christina Rossetti's brothers, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Michael Rossetti. Her second volume of poetry, “Shamrocks” (1887), contained exclusively Irish themes. Her own suggestion to Yeats that he should try his hand at an Irish subject resulted in his first collection, “The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems” published in 1889. Katharine Tynan lived in Ireland until her marriage to Henry Albert Hinkson in 1893. Hinkson was a barrister and novelist, and also a contemporary of Yeats. After the wedding, the couple moved to Ealing and Notting Hill before returning to Ireland in 1914, where Henry Albert Hinkson became a judge in County Mayo and died in 1919.Katherine Tynan, portrayed in a painting by John Butler Yeats in 1887 (now in the Municipal Gallery Dublin), wrote not only poetry collections but also 100 novels, twelve short story collections, three plays and anthologies, as well as countless articles on social issues such as child poverty and women's working conditions. She achieved widespread fame with her lyric and romantic poem “The Wind that Shakes the Barley”. Among her first significant novels are “Oh! What a Plague is Love” (1896) and her work of fiction “She Walks in Beauty” (1899). In 1913, her autobiographical literary memoir, “Twenty-Five Years: Reminiscences”, was published, incorporating several dozen of Yeats's early letters without his consent or opportunity to make corrections. In 1920, she sold Yeats's letters to the art collector John Quinn. Among her five autobiographical works was “Memoirs”, published in 1924, her last book. Following her equally significant novel, “The House in the Forest” (1928), her collected poetry was published in 1930 under the title “Collected Poems”.
Her marriage to Henry Albert Hinkson produced, among others, a daughter, Pamela Hinkson, who was also a writer. Katharine Tynan Hinkson died at the age of 72 on April 2, 1931 in Wimbledon, near London.
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The life in which nothing happens goes the fastest, because it has no landmarks.
