Born: 1862, Ireland (assumed)
Died: 1947
Country most active: France, Ireland
Also known as: Mary Barry Delany
This biography is republished from The Dictionary of Irish Biography and was written by Patrick Maume. Shared by permission in line with Creative Commons ‘Attribution’ (CC BY) licencing.
O’Delaney, Mary Barry (1862–1947), journalist and nationalist, was born Mary Barry Delany , though from the time she came to notice as a journalist she styled her surname O’Delaney (or sometimes O’Delany). In 1883 she left Ireland for Paris, where she lived in the Avenue Kléber and supported herself by journalism (including religious writings – she was an extremely devout catholic). Throughout her life O’Delaney also produced stories (including ghost stories) and poetry for newspaper publication. ‘They are not artistic but the sensational weirdness of some of them might suit a certain class of not very cultivated people’, Maud Gonne told W. B. Yeats in 1896, when asking him to assist in getting some of them published (Always your friend, 16).
In the 1890s O’Delaney was Paris correspondent of the Parnellite Irish Daily Independent. At this period she made Maud Gonne’s acquaintance and in February 1898 she published a poem hailing Gonne as ‘our island’s maiden queen’ and comparing her to Joan of Arc. O’Delaney worked closely with Gonne as researcher and companion for the rest of her life, though their relationship was interrupted by a bitter quarrel in March 1899, which led Gonne to wonder whether O’Delaney was insane (other observers referred to her as ‘that strange oddity’). O’Delaney became secretary of the Paris Young Ireland Society on its foundation in 1897, circulated reports of its proceedings to Irish papers, and acted as Gonne’s assistant editor on the Paris-based separatist journal L’Irlande Libre. It was she who suggested marking Queen Victoria’s 1900 visit to Ireland with a special number of L’Irlande Libre, which blamed the queen for the famine and all Ireland’s other misfortunes during her reign; this issue was banned in Ireland by the Dublin Castle authorities.
O’Delaney was one of those female acquaintances of Gonne whose inappropriate treatment by Major John MacBride (he exposed himself to her while drunk) led to the breakup of Gonne’s marriage. O’Delaney afterwards lived with Gonne and helped to look after her children, with whom she had a natural rapport: she revered the young Seán MacBride as her ‘glory boy’ and built him a toy theatre; in adolescence, however, Iseult Gonne came to be irritated by her conspicuous religious devotions. O’Delaney acted as Yeats’s secretary on his visits to France. In 1918 she accompanied Gonne on her return to Ireland and looked after her business affairs during her imprisonment. Her knee was shattered by a bullet during the Irish war of independence.
O’Delaney acted as godmother to Francis Stuart on his reception in 1920 into the catholic church. Her later years were spent at the Gonne–MacBride residence, Roebuck House, Clonskeagh, Co. Dublin, where she continued to collaborate in Gonne’s political activities and where she died in 1947. O’Delaney’s writings appeared under the initials ‘MB’, ‘MO’D’, and ‘MD’, as well as under her own name; she also used various pseudonyms, including ‘Joseph May’.
O’Delaney is an interesting example of a spiritually restless and economically self-supporting Bohemian professional woman involved in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century nationalist politics. Her mixture of ‘Celtic twilight’ and catholic-devotional sensibility should not obscure the extent to which she was the agent of her own destiny, nor her role as worker bee sustaining Maud Gonne as queen.