Born: 15 February 1830, Ireland
Died: 21 May 1910
Country most active: Australia
Also known as: Mary Anne Eva Kelly, Mary Eva O’Doherty
This biography is republished from The Dictionary of Irish Biography and was written by Brega Webb and Frances Clarke. Shared by permission in line with Creative Commons ‘Attribution’ (CC BY) licencing.
Kelly, (Mary Anne) Eva (1830–1910), poet and nationalist, known as ‘Eva of the Nation’, was born 15 February 1830 at the home of her maternal grandfather John O’Flaherty in Headford, Co. Galway, one of seven children of Edward Kelly and Mary Kelly (née O’Flaherty) of Killeen House, near Portumna, Co. Galway. She was a niece of the Dublin-based solicitor and Young Irelander Martin O’Flaherty. Her childhood years were divided between the Kelly family home and her grandfather’s next residence, Lisdonagh House, near Headford. Reared in a gentry household, she was educated at home by a governess, who encouraged her to write poetry and supervised her earliest efforts, which consisted primarily of translations from French. As a teenager she became a fervent nationalist and an enthusiastic reader of the Young Ireland paper, the Nation. She began contributing her own, predominantly patriotic, verse to the paper, and was the first female poet to be published in the Nation (7 Dec. 1844), her earliest work appearing under the pseudonym ‘Fionnula’. Though she was initially surprised to find her poetry accepted, in time she became one of the Nation’s best-known writers, her subsequent contributions in prose and verse appearing under her more famous pseudonym ‘Eva’ (from 29 February 1845). In the period that followed her work was also published in the militant Young Ireland papers, the United Irishman (1848), the Irish Felon (1848), and the Irishman (1848).
Having moved to Dublin in the late 1840s, she came into contact with leading nationalists, among them the young medical student Kevin Izod O’Doherty, to whom she became engaged. Though she had contributed verse to his paper, the Irish Tribune (1848), they first met during her visits to Newgate prison where he was awaiting trial for treason in 1848. After his conviction she encouraged him to reject an offer of pardon in return for an admission of guilt, and promised to wait indefinitely for him. She did so throughout his five-year exile in Van Diemen’s Land, during which she lived at Killeen House, where she took in the fugitive John Blake Dillon after the disastrous rising of 1848. She continued her association with the new edition of the Nation, her contributions from the period often drawing on her relationship with O’Doherty. Her devotion to the exiled patriot caught the public imagination and from September 1849 she was widely known as ‘Eva of the Nation’. As her fame spread, friends and admirers began addressing her as ‘Eva’, a name that she gradually adopted herself.
After O’Doherty was granted a conditional pardon in 1854 they married secretly on 23 August 1855 at Moorfields chapel, London, and immediately set out for Paris, where he resumed his studies. In Paris she found herself somewhat isolated, and relied on the support of expatriate Irish friends such as John Martin and John O’Leary (her aunt Alice was married to O’Leary’s uncle Jeremiah). O’Doherty’s receipt of an unconditional pardon in 1856 allowed for a return to Ireland, where the first of their eight children was born in May 1856. After a period living in Dublin, where she contributed to Chamber’s Journal, they emigrated to Australia in 1860. They initially settled in Sydney, where she became a regular contributor to the ‘Poet’s corner’ of the Sydney Freeman’s Journal (January to November 1861), and then in various parts of New South Wales, before moving to the small town of Ipswich, and on to Brisbane in 1865. While O’Doherty’s professional and political career thrived, she appears to have missed Irish friends, and throughout these years maintained her correspondence with John Martin. She continued writing, contributing a poem, ‘Chant’, to the Fenian Irish People (26 Aug. 1865), and composing an ode to mark Brisbane’s O’Connell centenary celebrations (1875). Two years later she travelled with three of her children to San Francisco to oversee the publication of a collection of her verse, Poems by Eva of the Nation (1877), but was disappointed by the poor response that met its release. She also played an active part in charity work, notably a campaign that raised £12,000 for Irish famine relief (c.1879).
Returning once again to Ireland in 1885, O’Doherty briefly held a seat as Parnellite MP for Meath North, but was unable to adjust to the new politics, and (in failing health) was forced to moved back to Australia in 1888. Their later years, sometimes spent apart (she remained in Brisbane while he worked in the frontier mining town of Croydon), were blighted by increasing financial difficulties and the deaths of their three remaining sons and grandson. Widowed in July 1905, she received financial support from a fund raised on her behalf. Her collected poems were published in Dublin in 1909, and included a memoir by Justin McCarthy in which he wrote that ‘“Eva” threw her whole soul into the national movement . . . No native of Ireland in past or present history ever devoted a life more constantly or consistently to the service of the country than did “Eva” of The Nation’ (xiii, xxi). She died 21 May 1910 in Brisbane, and was buried in Toowong cemetery, where an elaborate Celtic cross was erected to her memory and that of her husband by the Queensland Irish Association.