CESAIRE / Mythical First Woman in Ireland

CESAIRE

The Mythical First Woman in Ireland

As part of our celebration of the women who shaped Ireland, we felt it important to celebrate the mythical women whose stories have inspired our culture and heritage. For our first mythical woman, we’re going right back to the beginning.

Irish mythology has no story of the origins of mankind. Instead, our earliest stories tell of this land and the people that came to it. These magical races that were there long before the Celts, these peoples that retreated underground to become gods and fairies. But there were older peoples still; the proud Nemedians, the doomed Partholonians and the very first, the followers of Cesaire.

Cesaire was born somewhere in Northern Africa. She was said by some to be the granddaughter of an Egyptian priest, and by others to be the granddaughter of Noah (yes, that Noah!). Either way, her grandfather knew that a great flood was on the way. To avoid drowning, Cesaire built three arks and set course for an island far west, untouched by any sin and, as such, spared (she hoped) from the flood.

She gathered together one hundred and fifty women of art and skill. Warriors and weavers, healers and poets, bringing with them all the skills they would need to survive in a strange place. Her father and brother, not allowed on Noah’s Ark for their sins, begged her to let them come with her. She took them, and her husband Fintan, on one condition: that they forsake the god of Noah and submit to her.

Cesaire’s voyage lasted seven years, and she traversed the known world, losing two of her ships to storms along the way. When she arrived at last, and set foot on Ireland, three lakes are said to have burst forth in welcome.

Cesaire divided her followers into three groups, and put one man with each group, to keep the women satisfied. Under ancient Irish law, a woman could divorce her husband if he didn’t keep her sexually satisfied. Interestingly, this didn’t apply the other way around!. Her poor father wasn’t up to the task, and soon died. They re-divided into two groups, but Cesaire’s brother, wounded on the long journey, also did not last long. When her husband Fintan discovered that he was the only man among one hundred and fifty women, he fled, and lived wild in the caves and mountains, learning to shape-shift in order to survive.

What became of Cesaire is not clear. In some versions, the flood found her and wiped out her fledgling colony. In others, plague or sickness took them. Many credit her and her followers with being the first occupants of Ireland!

Our thanks to Sorcha Hegarty for this fantastic herstory!

LUCY, MARCHIONESS OF WHARTON / Society hostess and vicereine of Ireland

LUCY, MARCHIONESS OF WHARTON, MALMESBURY AND CATHERLOUGH

Society hostess and vicereine of Ireland

Rathfarnham/Dublin/Winchendon

c. 1670–1717

To some, Lucy Wharton was ‘the witty fair one’, irresistible to anyone who had ‘the honour of tasting her easy and agreeable conversation’. To Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, she was ‘a woman equally unfeeling and unprincipled: flattering, fawning, canting, affecting prudery and even sanctity, yet in reality as abandoned and unscrupulous as her husband’. The truth probably lay somewhere in between.

Born in around 1670, Lucy was the sole surviving child of Adam Loftus, 1st Viscount Lisburne and Lucy Bridges. Though not a great beauty, her looks were described as ‘so agreeable, that one cannot defend one’s heart against her’. Her father’s death in September 1691 also left her appealingly wealthy, with £5000 per year and lands including the Rathfarnham estate outside Dublin. Unsurprisingly, she had no trouble finding a husband. By January 1692, she was being referred to as the ‘new mistress’ of the widowed Whig politician, Thomas Wharton. By July, she was his wife.

The Whartons’ marriage would be unconventional even today. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries their behaviour was nothing short of scandalous. Thomas was notorious for his debauchery and Lucy too was known for what were politely called ‘her little excursions of love and gallantry’. Thomas did not react to her extra-marital liaisons as one might expect however, for far from being outraged at her affairs he instead encouraged them. His reasoning, according to Jonathan Swift, was that he felt himself ‘well recompensed by a return of children to support his family, without the fatigues of being a father’. Ultimately, Lucy bore three children; Philip in 1698, Jane in 1706 and Lucy in 1710. Whether they were Thomas’s remains to be seen.

Thomas (who was created Baron Wharton in 1696 and Earl of Wharton in 1706) was appointed Lord Lieutenant, or viceroy, of Ireland in 1708 and he and Lucy travelled to Dublin from their English seat, Winchendon, the following April. From their base at Dublin Castle they ran an establishment at which ‘dancing and dice’ were the order of the day and Lucy received their guests with what the eighteenth-century historian and distant relative, John Oldmixon, referred to as ‘that humanity and easiness, which adorn all the actions of her life’. Pregnancy prevented her from accompanying Thomas on his second and final trip in 1710, but from London she had petitions for friends fast-tracked by her husband’s secretary and took meetings with Irishmen visiting England who hoped she could secure them an Irish preferment from the Earl. Her tenure as vicereine may have been brief, but it demonstrated the social and political possibilities of the role and would be built upon by her successors.

Thomas died in 1715, soon after being raised to the rank of Marquess. Lucy followed just two years later and was buried with him at Winchendon. Her will is noticeably devoid of many of the religious sentiments common to the day, a final example of her lifelong disregard for the rules of polite society.

Thanks to Dr. Rachel Wilson (University of Leeds) for this week's herstory

Sources:

Oxford D.N.B. (Wharton, Thomas, first marquess of Wharton, first marquess of Malmesbury, and first marquess of Catherlough (1648–1715)); Mary de la Riviere Manley, Secret memoirs and manners of several persons of quality of both sexes from the New Atlantis (4 vols, 7th ed., London, 1736), i, 138.

The letters and works of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, ed., Lord Wharncliffe (2 vols, London, 1866), i, 70. Oxford D.N.B. (Wharton, Thomas, first marquess of Wharton, first marquess of Malmesbury, and first marquess of Catherlough (1648–1715)).

de la Riviere Manley, Secret memoirs and manners, i, 138.

Will of The Right Honourable Adam Lord Viscount Lisburne (The National Archives, Prob. 11/406/230, 1691); Oxford D.N.B. (Wharton, Thomas, first marquess of Wharton, first marquess of Malmesbury, and first marquess of Catherlough (1648–1715)).

Oxford D.N.B. (Wharton, Thomas, first marquess of Wharton, first marquess of Malmesbury, and first marquess of Catherlough (1648–1715)).

Quote from de la Riviere Manley, Secret memoirs and manners, i, 138.

Jonathan Swift, A short character of his Excellency Thomas Earl of Wharton, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland …(London [Dublin?], 1711), p. 5.

Oxford D.N.B. (Wharton, Thomas, first marquess of Wharton, first marquess of Malmesbury, and first marquess of Catherlough (1648–1715)).

Agnes Hamilton to the countess of Panmure, 10 May 1710 (National Records of Scotland, MS GD45/14/238/25); John Oldmixon, Memoirs of the Life of the Most Noble Thomas, Late Marquess of Wharton (London, 1715), pp 69–70.

Joseph Addison to Joshua Dawson, 28 Mar. 1710, in The letters of Joseph Addison, ed., Walter Graham (Oxford, 1941), p. 208; John C. Hodges, ‘The dating of Congreve’s letters’ in P.M.L.A., li, no. 1 (1936), pp 160–1.

Rachel Wilson, ‘The vicereines of Ireland and the transformation of the Dublin court, 1703–1737’ in The Court Historian, xix, no. 1 (2014), pp 12–14.

Oxford D.N.B. (Wharton, Thomas, first marquess of Wharton, first marquess of Malmesbury, and first marquess of Catherlough (1648–1715)).

Will of Lucy Wharton Marchionesse of Wharton and Malmesbury (The National Archives, Prob. 11/557/45,1717).

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.

ADA REHAN / COMIC ACTRESS

ADA REHAN

Comic actress

Limerick / New York / Rest of the World

1860 – 1916

Ada Rehan was once one of Ireland’s most celebrated actresses, yet she is barely remembered by us today. Born Delia Crehan in Shannon Street, Limerick on April 1860 22nd (or possibly, 1857 according to varying sources), Rehan moved to Brooklyn with her family when she was still a child. A mistake made early in her career by the manager of Arch Street Theater, Philadelphia who billed her as Ada C. Rehan inspired her stage name. She adopted the new name and earned an international reputation as an excellent Shakespearean actress, lauded particularly for her roles in his comedies.

Statuesque, with striking grey-blue eyes and rich brown hair, Rehan’s appeal was much celebrated. According to theatre critic William Winter: “Her physical beauty was of the kind that appears in portraits of women by Romney and Gainsborough—ample, opulent, and bewitching—and it was enriched by the enchantment of superb animal spirits.”

Of course, there was far more to Ada than her looks. Oscar Wilde described her as “that brilliant and fascinating genius.” In 1879, Rehan joined impresario Augustin Daly’s New York based theatre company where she enjoyed leading lady status for twenty years, enjoying enormous success on the stages of America and Europe. For a time, she was considered a worthy rival to the great actress of the time, Sarah Bernhardt.

In 1891, when Wilde was assembling his cast for the first production of Lady Windermere’s Fan, he wrote to Daly requesting that he consider the part of Mrs. Erlynne for Ada, insisting that: “‘I would sooner see her play the part of Mrs. Erlynne than any English-speaking actress we have, or French actress for that matter.” Daly turned him down.

Years later, Wilde, recently released from prison, was negotiating with Daly to write a new play for Rehan. Sadly, Daly died unexpectedly during these negotiations. For Rehan this was as much a personal tragedy as a professional one and she was touched by Wilde’s kindness afterward.

Rehan took over negotiations and agreed to pay Wilde an advance of £100 with the promise of £200 on acceptance in return for ‘a new and original comedy, in three or four acts’. Once he realised that the deadline agreed was wildly optimistic, he offered to return the £100, which he had spent, but he was dead before raising the required sum.

Rehan retired from the stage in 1906, and lived in New York City until her death in 1916. Obituaries were published in the New York Times and the Limerick Chronicle, and she was commemorated two decades later when a US Navy cargo ship was named the USS Ada Rehan.

Thanks to Eleanor Fitzsimons, author of Wilde's Women, for this fabulous biography.

Sources:

Letter to Augustin Daly, August 1897 in The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde. Merlin Holland and Rupert Hart Davis (Eds) (London: Fourth Estate, 2000), p.489

W. Graham Robertson. Time Was, the reminiscences of W. Graham Robertson (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1945), p.231

Russell Jackson, ‘Oscar Wilde’s Contract for a New Play 1900’ in Theatre Notebook, Volume 50, Number 2 contained in Volumes 50-52 (Society for Theatre Research, 1996), p.113

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)

LADY MARY HEATH / AVIATOR & ATHLETE

LADY MARY HEATH

Record-breaking aviator and athlete / Campaigner for women’s rights

Limerick / London

1896 - 1939

This pioneering aviator’s early life was marked by tragic circumstances that, in all likelihood, shaped her character as a person who always resisted gender inequality.

Sophie Peirce-Evans was born in Limerick to violent alcoholic John Peirce-Evans, and his housekeeper, Teresa Dooling. When Sophie was 13 months old, Evans brutally murdered Dooling. He spent the rest of his life in Dublin’s Central Mental Hospital, while Sophie was raised by her grandparents.

In 1914, Sophie enrolled in Dublin’s Royal College of Science. She was an excellent student, active in the hockey club and the Agricultural Debating Club, and edited the school magazine, The Torch.

In 1916, she met and married Captain William Davies Eliott-Lynn. She postponed her studies to become a motor dispatch rider in France in 1917–19, while her husband recovered from malaria contracted on service in South Africa.

In 1919, she returned to Dublin to complete her studies while her husband established a farm in east Africa. He ordered her to find paid employment, so she worked briefly as a zoology demonstrator in Aberdeen before moving to London. She visited east Africa for several months in 1922–3 and 1924.

In London, she became involved in athletics and by 1921 was ranked 2nd in Britain and Ireland in the high jump. In 1922, she became a founding member of the British Women’s Amateur Athletic Association; by 1924, it had 23,000 members, and Sophie was its president. She represented Britain in the Women’s Modern Olympic Games in Paris in 1922, competing in front of over 30,000 spectators.

By late 1923, Sophie shared the women’s world record for high jump (1.485m) with American Elizabeth Stine. She published articles on athletics and, in 1925, read the preface to her book, Athletics for Girls and Women in a BBC radio broadcast. She presented papers on women’s sport at the 8th Olympic Congress in Prague, citing childbearing as evidence of the capabilities of women’s bodies.

A turning-point came in August 1925, when she became one of the first members of the London Aeroplane Club. She persisted with flying lessons despite financial difficulties, and received her private pilot’s licence on 4 November.

Lady Mary Heath by Séan Branigan of Storyboard Workshop

However, in April 1924 the International Commission for Air Navigation had passed a resolution banning women from operating commercial aircraft, treating menstruation as a disability. Sophie joined forces with journalist Stella Wolfe Murray to win a difficult campaign against the resolution, detailed in their book, Women and Flying (1929). Sophie thereby became Britain’s first officially recognised female commercial pilot, paving the way for other women to follow and performing public flight demonstrations and stunts. She was elected a member of the Royal Aeronautical Society, but as a woman was not permitted to attend meetings. The Society brushed off her letters of complaint.

After the death of her first husband, she married 75-year-old Sir James Heath, a wealthy collier owner and MP. She was henceforth known as Lady Mary Heath.

In autumn 1927, the pair set off by steam liner for Cape Town with her brand new Avro Avian safely stowed in the hold. She launched her famous south–north flyover of Africa on 5 Jan 1928, landing in Croydon on 18 May. For this feat she was elected Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, an honour reserved for the most intrepid explorers.

Thereafter, her star went into decline. In 1931, she divorced Sir James and married her Jamaican lover Reginald ‘Jack’ Williams, who she met in America; the marriage lasted only four years.

In August 1929, Lady Mary was seriously injured when her plane crashed through a factory roof in Ohio. She never fully recovered, and it was probably as a result of long-term head injury that she died after falling from a London tram in May 1939. The tenacity of her early victories for women in athletics and aviation remain, however, to secure her pioneering legacy.

Sources: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography online edition; Lindie Naughton, Lady Icarus: The Life of Irish Aviator Lady Mary Heath (Ashfield Press, 2004).

The Queen of the Skies will be celebrated in a new play entitled ‘I see you’, written and performed by Amy De Bhrún as part of the Herstory programme. 

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.