TYNAN, KATHARINE A Little Book of XXIV Carols.

Portland, Maine: Thomas Mosher, 1916. Small octavo. Second edition. pp. viii, 41. Titlepage with printer's device printed in red and a few headpieces in black and initials in red throughout. Handsomely bound by Hatchards of Piccadilly in full terracotta morocco, rectangular gilt fillets to the boards; spine in panels; board edges and turn-ins ruled in gilt; grey-blue endpapers. Bookplate of Oliver Sterling Lee. All edges gilt. A limited edition of 950 copies printed on Van Gelder handmade paper. A handsome copy in superb condition.

Porch A "Katharine Tynan (1861-1931), poet and novelist, born at Whitehall dairy farm, Clondalkin, County Dublin; one of 12 children of Andrew Cullen Tynan and Elizabeth Reilly Tynan. Educated at Dominican Convent of St Catherine of Siena, Drogheda. Suffered chronic eye ulcers in childhood; considered religious novitiate; first poem published in Graphic, 1878. She became a member of Ladies' Land League, with Anna Parnell and Mrs A. M. Sullivan.
She first met W. B. Yeats ('all dreams and gentleness'), June 1885, in connection with C. H. Oldham's Dublin University Review; advised by him in early correspondence to make a speciality of her Irish Catholicism; her suggestion to Yeats that he should try an Irish subject resulted in Wanderings of Oisin. Katharine idolised Parnell and supported him after his downfall; lived in Ireland till her marriage to Henry Albert Hinkson, 1893, a barrister and novelist and contemporary of Yeats in Erasmus Smith High School, whom she converted to Catholicism, moving to Ealing and Notting Hill; later he became resident magistrate in County Mayo from 1914 until his death in 1919.

[PORCH A]