Born: Unknown (1700s), United Kingdom
Died: Unknown (1800s)
Country most active: United Kingdom
Also known as: NA
This biography is republished from The Dictionary of Irish Biography and was written by Linde Lunney. Shared by permission in line with Creative Commons ‘Attribution’ (CC BY) licencing.
Balfour, Mary E. (fl. 1789–1810), poet, was born on 24 January; one source gives the year as 1755. However, if – as seems likely – she was the eldest daughter of John Balfour (who seems to have been a doctor in Derry city before becoming a clergyman in 1789, and who married (January 1778) a daughter of Dr Samuel Moore of Derry), her birth may have been as late as 1789, which would accord with the dates of Balfour’s other daughters and with the character of her poems. John Balfour was appointed rector of Errigal, Co. Londonderry, by Bishop Frederick Hervey. After their father’s death (1807) the daughters had to support themselves by teaching, first in Newtown Limavady, then in Belfast. Neither school was very successful. Hope: a poetical essay with various other poems (Belfast, 1810) contains ambitious works, one in heroic couplets with classical allusions, but is perhaps most notable for the poems intended as words for the Irish melodies collected by Edward Bunting. Balfour’s interest in Irish folklore and music is unusually early, and she apparently knew Irish. In 1814 her ‘Kathleen O’Neil: a grand national melodrama in three acts’, about a female deerslayer, was staged in Belfast; it was published anonymously the same year. The date of her death is uncertain: a note in a volume of poems by John McKinley (1819) states that he thinks she had died, but the evidence is inconclusive.