Sherry Chandler

Lady Jane Wilde

All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That’s his.
—Oscar Wilde, from The Importance of Being Earnest*

Oscar Wilde’s mother, Jane Francesca Agnes, Lady Wilde (1821-1896), had her own run-ins with the law. She was a fire-brand for Irish independence and women’s rights. Under the pseudonym Speranza, she published poems and commentary in The Nation, a Nationalist newspaper established by the Young Ireland Party. I often see her poetry described as “anti-famine.” Speranza was active in the 1840s; the potato blight struck in 1845.

Up until The Great Hunger, the Young Irelanders had been a nonviolent movement. The famine changed that. When, in 1848, Speranza wrote an article calling for armed rebellion and the paper’s publisher refused to reveal her name, the British government shut the paper down.

The Young Irelander or Famine Rebellion began on July 29, 1848, after the British suspended habeas corpus. It failed rather quickly. One of its leaders, William Smith O’Brien, was found guilty of treason and subsequently sentenced to be hanged, drawn, and quartered. Another, Thomas Francis Meagher, found guilty of sedition, was also sentenced to death. Because of “public outcry,” both sentences were commuted to expulsion to Van Diemen’s Land. Meagher later escaped to the United States, where he led the Irish Brigade in the Civil War.

Lady Wilde was widowed at 55 and, discovering that her husband had left her very little, she moved from Dublin to London to live with her older son Willie, who was a journalist. Oscar, of course, was also in London at this time. Lady Wilde eked out a living writing books and articles on Irish folklore.

She was among those who urged Oscar to stick in London and fight his conviction.

At age 75, she contracted bronchitis, and knowing that she was dying, she asked permission to visit Oscar in prison. The permission was denied. She died on February 3, 1896. Oscar paid for her funeral but could not afford a tombstone so she was buried anonymously in common ground.

The Victorian Women Writers Project has an online copy of Poems by Speranza, 2nd edition, published about 1871. I find them the worst kind of patriotic doggerel, the kind of thing Wilfred Owen later condemned in “Dulce et Decorum Est.” Given Lady Wilde’s circumstances, the excessive ardor for heroes might be understood, but that still can’t make her a great poet by modern standards. The example below is the most palatable one I could find.

Her Ancient Legends, Mystic Charms, and Superstitions of Ireland, posted by Library Ireland, is a lot more fun.

There was a man, also, equally dreaded on account of the strange, fatal power of his glance; and so many accidents and misfortunes were traced to his presence that finally the neighbours insisted that he should wear a black patch over the Evil Eye, not to be removed unless by request; for learned gentlemen, curious in such things, sometimes came to him to ask for a proof of his power, and he would try it for a wager while drinking with his friends.

One day, near an old ruin of a castle, he met a boy weeping in great grief for his pet pigeon, which had got up to the very top of the ruin, and could not be coaxed down.

“What will you give me,” asked the man, “if I bring it down for you?”

“I have nothing to give,” said the boy, “but I will pray to God for you. Only get me back my pigeon, and I shall be happy.”

Then the man took off the black patch and looked up steadfastly at the bird; when all of a sudden it fell to the ground and lay motionless, as if stunned; but there was no harm done to it, and the boy took it up and went his way, rejoicing.

Lady Wilde’s poem. I’ve no idea who the traitor is. Tone and Fitzgerald were players in the Rebellion of 1798:

A LAMENT.

I.

GONE from us–dead to us–he whom we worshipped so!
      Low lies the altar we raised to his name;
Madly his own hand hath shattered and laid it low–
      Madly his own breath hath blasted his fame.
He whose proud bosom once raged with humanity,
      He whose broad forehead was circled with might,
Sunk to a time-serving, driv’lling inanity–
      God! Why not spare our loved country the sight?

II.

Was it the gold of the stranger that tempted him?
      Ah! we’d have pledged to him body and soul;
Toiled for him–fought for him–starved for him–died for him–
      Smiled, tho’ our graves were the steps to his goal.
Breathed he one word in his deep, earnest whispering,
      Wealth, crown, and kingdom, were laid at his feet;
Raised he his right hand, the millions would round him cling–
      Hush! ’tis the Sassenach ally you greet.

III.

Leaders have fallen–we wept, but we triumphed, too–
      Patriot blood never sinks in the sod;
He falls, and the jeers of the nation he bent to sue
      Rise like accusing weird spirits to God.
Weep for him–weep for him–deep is the tragedy–
      Angels themselves now might doubt of God’s truth;
Souls from their bloody graves, shuddering, rise to see
      How he avenges their lost, murdered youth.

IV.

Tone, and Fitzgerald, and the pale-brow’d enthusiast–
      He whose heart broke, but shrank not from the strife;
Davis, the latest loved–he who in glory passed,
      Kindling Hope’s lamp with the chrism of life.
Well may they wail for him–power and might were his–
      Loved as no mortal was loved in the land–
What has he sold them for? Sorrow and shame it is,
      Fair words and false from a recreant band.

V.

Time’s shade was on him; what matter? we loved him yet;
      Aye, would have torn the veins with our teeth,
Made him a bath of our young blood to pay the debt–
      Purchased his life, tho’ we bought it by death.
Pray for him–pray: an archangel has fallen low;
      There’s a throne less in Heaven, there is sorrow on earth.
Weep, angels–laugh, demons! When his hand could strike the blow,
      Where shall we seek for truth, honour, or worth?

— Lady Jane Wilde, from Poems
Transcribed and encoded by Carolyn C. Sherayko
Edited by Perry Willett
TEI formatted filesize uncompressed: approx. 339 kbytes
Library Electronic Text Resource Service (LETRS), Indiana University
Bloomington, IN
July 31, 1996

____________
*I found this quote as a head note to Seamus Heaney’s lecture “Speranza in Reading: On ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’” in The Redress of Poetry (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1995). A tidbit from that essay: according to Heaney, Lady Wilde traced her maiden name, Elgee, to Alighieri, and so considered herself a descendant of Dante.

1. Oscar Wilde
2. The Ballad of Reading Gaol
3. Richard Henry Wilde
4. Looking for Irish-American Writers
5. Lady Mary Chudleigh (1656-1710)

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