I don’t like picking favourites, but I can’t help it here. My favourite discovery was learning that my three-times-great grandmother Anne Kavanagh, nee Nugent, was a published author. This past week, I held her little book of collected stories, The Gift, for the first time.
Also this past week, on Twitter, Jane MacNamara (Where the Story Takes Me) recommended an article by Cindi Foreman, “Telling My Ancestor’s “Settler Stories,”” a family history post that looks, in part, at how the Irish, oppressed by the English, could then turn around and do the same as settlers taking Indigenous Peoples’ lands in North America. In the article, Foreman looks at her own family history in Ontario and offers a list of ten things genealogists and family historians can do, as well as a number of resources for further reading and learning.
Because I was thinking about 19th Century women writing, and about First Nations and colonialism, I looked to see if recent research had added to the list of First Nations women writing in the 1800s in the 30 years since I was in university. As far as I could tell, the answer is no. Emily Pauline Johnson — Tekahionwake — is alone on that list. I have only read the tiniest bit of her work, so I’m doing some catching up now.
The list of 19th Century Irish women writers is considerably longer than Pauline Johnson’s one-person list. However, it seems very few have been remembered and are only now being re-evaluated by scholars. I don’t know where The Gift, Containing Three Catholic Tales would rank among forgotten Irish literature. It is a very Catholic book and at the time it was published, it was described as “suitable for young people” — two things that might make it easy for a modern reader to discount. To me, it is an incredible family record, too good to be true really. I still get teary when I look at it. But it is also a fascinating snapshot of a middle-class, intellectual woman’s thinking in 19th Century Ireland. It is a little miracle — not only that any copies of the book survive, but that it exists at all.
I can hold it in the palm of one hand, this tiny relic with its bright blue cover. It was published in the spring of 1863, embossed and bound 157 years ago in Derby, England. Anne Kavanagh was 41 years old. She and her husband Professor James William Kavanagh had just celebrated their 20th wedding anniversary and she was pregnant with their 15th child. The family lived in Sutton, Howth (Dublin) in a gothic revival house called St. Laurence Lodge, which was owned by the Earl of Howth and still stands today.
Professor Kavanagh had not always been a university lecturer. He started out as a school teacher, and then rose to the position of head teacher and ultimately head inspector of Ireland’s National Schools. The National Schools were a ground-breaking attempt at public, non-denominational primary education, but James William Kavanagh found problems during his inspections and was vocal about them. In 1857, he took a principled and public stand against what he said was use of Protestant materials to teach Catholic children in an attempt to convert them, in schools that were supposed to be secular. His superiors were furious and in February 1858 he lost his job.
Supported by the Catholic hierarchy, Kavanagh’s battle continued. In 1859, there was an inquiry in the British House of Commons (just reading the inspector’s correspondence leading up to his dismissal is exhausting). There were many who wanted to discredit him personally and professionally, and he remained resolute in presenting his evidence. I think he and Anne were incredibly brave to take on this battle, sacrificing their livelihood and risking their family’s future to speak out.
James William Kavanagh cobbled together a freelance income, continuing the freelance writing and editing work he had been doing. He toured around Ireland to give popular public lectures on science and literature. One topic I would have loved to have heard was on the contributions of women geographers to the field. He was also given a position as a professor of mathematics at the recently founded, and unaccredited, Catholic University founded with Saint John Henry Newman as its first Rector.
Anne Kavanagh was a writer and a French translator, according to her daughter Agnes Hickey’s obituary [1]. I wonder if Anne Kavanagh started publishing in this uneasy period, to supplement the family income, or if she had always taken time to pursue and publish her writing? I have so many questions and I can’t imagine how there could ever be answers unless there is some dusty hidden archive somewhere, waiting to be found — like the blue book sitting on the table beside me.
A review published in The Freeman’s Journal, August 6, 1863, says the stories in The Gift had been previously published – I’m assuming in the periodical press. Are there more stories by Anne Kavanagh out there? It seems possible at least. If I had unfettered time and money, I think spending some time looking for Anne is what I would do with it.
When did she manage to write? She was a middle-class lady, and so must have had the advantage of household help. But she would have had plenty of non-writing work to do, and unlike most women writing at the time, she had a large family of young children to care for. Did she stay up at night, with her husband out at one of his committee meetings or lectures, the house quiet with children sleeping for the moment. Did she carve out time in the morning, sitting at a desk near the fire? Did she rise early, stay cozy in bed with writing paper and pencil at the ready? Did Professor Kavanagh support her work and encourage her? Did the children know to leave Mamma alone at certain times, when she was doing her work? Did the impulse to write contribute to her early death?
For a few years, I didn’t know the title of Anne Kavanagh’s book – I just had the reference in the Brooklyn Eagle to her being a writer. Then I had another “favourite discovery”. I met (online) two amazing cousins descended from the O’Raffertys and the Kavanaghs, living in Australia. This was when some things started to fall into place.
How was Anne Kavanagh educated? I still don’t know, but thanks to my cousin Pauline Newell, I do now know that Anne Nugent’s mother was Bridget O’Rafferty, a sister to the influential Parish Priest of Tullamore, Rev. Dr. James O’Rafferty. Bridget married William Nugent, a Tullamore linen and woolen draper. Anne was born in 1822, so her infancy and early childhood would have coincided with Daniel O’Connell’s fight for Catholic emancipation. The penal laws that forbade education for Irish Catholics and any others who did not conform with the Church of Ireland, were still within living memory. My ancestors’ families clearly had the ability to pay for private education over the years, but what was it like?
I don’t know if there was a girls’ school in Tullamore. Anne was a young teenager by the time the Mercy Sisters established their first convent outside Dublin in Tullamore, at the invitation of Rev. Dr. O’Rafferty. The Sisters’ Sacred Heart school for girls in Tullamore was not opened until 1839, when Anne was already 17. Was she tutored? Did her parents teach her? Did she go to a school in Tullamore, or elsewhere? She certainly learned French well enough to be a translator, and also to have a deep interest in France, where two of her short stories in The Gift are set. I also wonder if it was education, or their interest in intellectual pursuits, that brought Anne Nugent and James Kavanagh together in some way.
The couple were married in Tullamore on October 10, 1842, when she was 20. The horrors of the first famine years were just receding and the Great Famine had not yet started. The couple did not settle in Tullamore, and in 1850 Anne’s parents William and Bridget Nugent, along with all of Anne’s siblings — James, Mary, and Kate Nugent — left Ireland for America. They settled in Ohio, where they were resident in time for the 1850 U.S. Census. Learning this was another of my favourite genealogy discoveries, because Pauline Newell was able to give meaning to a random scrap of hand-me-down family tree that I had in a box. It was meaningless to me, but Pauline was able to find in it information she was looking for and the story finally came together.
But it was our other cousin, Ian Thomson, who manages a Wikitree for the Kavanaghs, who got the whole discussion going in the first place, who filled in more Kavanagh detail, and who made it possible to find The Gift.
Ian shared the information he received about the Kavanaghs’ eldest daughter Brigid Mary, who became Mother Mary Patrick, a Superior of the Presentation Convent in Galway. He had requested information from the convent and a Sister kindly sent him a transcription from the annals that included an unsourced newspaper clipping of Mother Mary Patrick’s 1933 obituary. The Irish clipping provided much more about her parents including: “[J.W. Kavanagh’s] wife, the mother of Mother M. Patrick, was author of an exquisite volume, The Gift, and engaged on a Life of Joan of Arc when she died at the early age of forty. The family resided at Sutton, Dublin, where they had a wide circle of friends, including the late Margaret Stokes and her distinguished father.”
With the title, it was possible to find the book at last. A digitized copy is available from the British Museum library through Google Books, but I now see it is very different to see the physical book. I feel so lucky to have found a surviving printed copy at all. It was only because I was fact-checking for the initial research for this writing prompt, that I discovered a copy was actually for sale.
Now that I have this amazing little source, there is so much more to discover about Anne Kavanagh’s life – what she was reading, who her friends were in Dublin, what they were thinking and talking about, and their activism. I wonder what we’ll discover next.
[1] Brooklyn Eagle, February 6, 1939
Root and Blade 