Katharine Tynan

Marilyn Gaddis Rose

1974
93 pages
ISBN 0-8387-7770-8
Irish Writers Series

Katharine Tynan is another contribution to the Irish Writers Series. These monographs have been designed to treat in individual volumes the significant Anglo-Irish writers of the 19th and 20th centuries. When complete the series will constitute a significant history of modern Anglo-Irish literature, encompass discussions of nearly 40 writers.

Katharine Tynan's popularity is a gauge of English and Irish taste, especially female and middle class, during the first three decades of this century. At one with her readers, it was second nature for her to voice their ideals in her poetry, her most rigorously controlled genre, and to flatter their aspirations and rationalize their prejudices in her prose.

Professor Rose here examines this author in terms of her consecutive roles: as her father's girl and as the hostess who encouraged the young men of the Irish Renaissance with her precocious publishing and ready hospitality; as the wife and mother who wrote for "hearth and home"; and as the determined widow whose writing had to be her life. Author of more than eighty titles-poetry, fiction, and journal articles, Katharine Tynan usually managed to imply that a man's world is not the best of all possible worlds for a woman. She wrote to women, about women, and on behalf of women.

About the author:

Marilyn Gaddis Rose, a Comparatist who was introduced to Anglo-Irish letters by Samuel Beckett, has written monographs on Julian Green and Jack. B. Yeats and translated Axel by Villiers de l'Isle-Adam. She is professor and Chairman of the Department of Comparative Literature at the State University of New York at Binghamton.