Born: 1865, Ireland
Died: 22 January 1955
Country most active: Canada
Also known as: Moira O’Neill, Agnes Shakespear Higginson, Nesta
The Dictionary of Irish Biography and was written by Linde Lunney and Bridget Hourican. Shared by permission in line with Creative Commons ‘Attribution’ (CC BY) licencing.
Skrine, Agnes (‘Nesta’) Shakespeare (‘Moira O’Neill’) (c.1865–1955), author, was youngest among three daughters of Charles Henry Higginson (1824–94) of Springmount, Co. Antrim, colonial administrator in Mauritius, and his wife and cousin Mary, daughter of Sir James MacAuley Higginson, KCB, governor of Mauritius. There were also four sons, who all served in the army. The parents were doubly related, and the family was connected by marriage and descent with almost all the gentry families of Co. Antrim; Agnes’s sister’s grandson was John Turnly. Agnes (called ‘Nesta’ in the family) was probably born in Mauritius, but from about 1874 the family home was at Rockport, Cushendun, Co. Antrim. Her poems began to appear in Blackwood’s Magazine from 1892. In 1893 she published a children’s book, The elf-errant (in which she subtly contrasts the Irish and English characters), and in 1894 a short novel, An Easter vacation; both were quite successful. On 5 June 1895 at Cushendun she married Walter Clarmont Skrine of Warleigh Manor, Somerset, and for five or six years they lived on his ranch in Alberta, Canada. While in Canada, she expressed her homesickness for Ireland – and especially for the sea – in wistful poems about the country and people round Cushendun; they were published first in Blackwood’s, but twenty-five were collected into Songs of the Glens of Antrim (1901).
Like other authors during the Irish literary revival, Skrine (who always wrote as ‘Moira O’Neill’) used an artificial ‘Irish’ dialect, which has since fallen out of fashion; the sentimentality of the poems is also less acceptable than it was when she wrote, and her celebration of peasant life from a ‘Big House’ vantage point has been criticised. She, however, described the poems as ‘written by a glens-woman in the dialect of the glens and chiefly for the pleasure of other glens-people’ (Sage, 481). In their own day they were widely popular, even beloved, especially by emigrant readers, and critically admired: John Masefield commended their charm and deep feeling for place (Times, 3 Feb. 1955), and Ernest Boyd in Ireland’s literary renaissance (1916) called them genuine peasant poetry. The Songs ran to at least twelve editions and the poems were so frequently set to music and so widely performed, both as concert pieces and as recitations, that, according to Stephen Gwynn, this was ‘one of the very few books which, if all copies were destroyed, could probably be reproduced from oral tradition’ (Gwynn, 139). Sir Charles Stanford and Hamilton Harty wrote settings for some of them, and the songs were recorded by Plunket Greene and Kathleen Ferrier (1912–53). The Skrines and their young son returned to Ireland soon after 1900, and from about 1907 lived at Ballyrankin House, Ferns, Co. Wexford. After the house was burned down by republicans c. 1921, the family moved temporarily to stay with cousins in the north, but moved back when Ballyrankin was made habitable. More songs of the Glens of Antrim appeared in 1921, and her Collected poems, which also contained translations from the Italian, in 1933. Walter Skrine died 28 June 1930; Nesta Skrine became a recluse, and died 22 January 1955 in Ballyrankin.
She had three sons and two daughters; the younger daughter was the writer Molly (Skrine) Keane, who described her childhood as austere and neglected, her parents as totally reclusive, and her mother in particular as ‘terribly idle’ (Conversation piece, p. ii) and ‘alarmingly prudish and old-fashioned . . . she had great taste but was totally oblivious to comfort’ (Rising tide, pp. ix–x). Nesta’s determination to instil the importance of manners and modesty, and the consequent unhappy relationship between mother and daughter, are reflected in Good behaviour (1981) and other Keane novels. With the exception of her close friends and extended family she was uninterested in social life, and thus never involved herself in the literary scene. David Finkelstein, An index to Blackwood’s Magazine 1901–1980 (1995) lists her contributions from October 1901 to March 1925; for earlier contributions, see The Wellesley guide to Victorian periodicals 1824–1900. Family papers are in the PRONI at D/3590.