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Mary ‘Psyche’Tighe (née Blachford), poet. An important cache of handwritten poems.
Pp 17 manuscript including Expedition for Liverpool 1796, Marche Des Marseilles translated 1793, The Eclipse written for
Tony” 1804, The Irish Cry Which Is Howled Out For The Death Or Departures Of Friends In Ireland 1821, Bryan Byrne of Glen-
malure. Interesting lot, sizes from 2 by 1 inch to 9 by 5 inches.”
With contemporaneous manuscript note: Found in a drawer....in Mrs H. Tighe’s room at Mossana, 14 Jan 1824”.”
Mary Tighe was born in Dublin to Theodosia Tighe, a Methodist leader, andWilliam Blachford (d.1773?), a Church of Ireland
clergyman and librarian. When she was twenty-one she married Henry Tighe (1768–1836), her first cousin and a member
of the Parliament of Ireland for Inistiogue, County Kilkenny. The couple moved to London in the early nineteenth century.
Tighe became acquainted with Thomas Moore, an early admirer of her writing, as well as Shelley and Keats. Although she
had written since girlhood, she published nothing until Psyche (1805), a six-canto allegorical poem in Spenserian stanzas.
Psyche was admired by many and praised by Thomas Moore in his poem, To Mrs. Henry Tighe on reading her Psyche”.Hav-
ing suffered for at least a year, Mary Tighe endured a serious attack of tuberculosis in 1805. In February 1805 Thomas Moore
states that she had “a very serious struggle for life” However Mary Tighe lived for another five years and spent her last few
months of life as an invalid at her brother-in-law’s estate in Woodstock, Co. Wicklow, Ireland. She was buried in Initsiogue
Church, Co. Kilkenny.The year following her death a new edition of Psyche was released, along with some previously un-
published poems; it was this edition that established her literary reputation. John Keats was one of her admirers and paid
tribute to her in his poem, “To Some Ladies”. Pam Perkins writes that “[d]espite the bleakness of many of the short poems
in the 1811 volume, in much of the nineteenth-century writing on Tighe there is a tendency to make her an exemplar of
patiently (and picturesquely) long-suffering femininity, a tendency exemplified most famously in Felicia Hemans’s tribute
to her, ‘The Grave of a Poetess’.”
Estimate €300-€500 £220-£370
Large Image & Place Bid 420