This biography is republished from The Dictionary of Irish Biography and was written by Frances Clarke. Shared by permission in line with Creative Commons ‘Attribution’ (CC BY) licencing.
Born: 3 August 1879, Ireland
Died: 1967
Country most active: Ireland
Also known as: Mary Devenport
O’Neill, Mary (1879–1967), poet and playwright, was born 3 August 1879 in Barrack St., Loughrea, Co. Galway, daughter of John Devenport , RIC sub-constable, and Bridget Devenport (née Burke). Having received her initial education at the Dominican convent, Eccles St., Dublin, she went on to attend the Metropolitan School of Art (1898–1903), where she was awarded the year’s prize in 1900. During this period she seems to have considered a teaching career, and is listed on the college register as a teacher in training in 1901 and 1902–3. During her student years she entered into a correspondence with the writer Joseph O’Neill, whose poetry she admired. The two subsequently became close and were married 19 June 1908, after which they settled in Kenilworth Square, Dublin. While her modern tastes and unconventional attitudes upset many of her husband’s more academic friends, she was a popular member of what became known as ‘the Rathgar Group’, which regularly met at the Sunday afternoon salon of George Russell. In the years that followed she established her own influential salon, her long-standing ‘Thursdays at home’ being attended by writers such as Russell, Richard Irvine Best, Padraic Colum, Frank O’Connor, Francis Stuart and his wife Iseult, and W. B. Yeats, with whom she shared an admiration for Péguy and Claudel. Yeats became a particular friend and confidant, most particularly during the writing of A vision (1925), when he recorded their weekly literary consultations in his diary. He later included one of her poems in his Oxford anthology of English verse (1936).
Having contributed her own lyrics to her husband’s play ‘The kingdom maker’ (1917), she went on to publish her only book, Prometheus and other poems, in 1929. She subsequently contributed occasional, largely modernist poetry and plays to the Irish Times, The Bell, and the Dublin Magazine, and collaborated with Austin Clarke on Lyric Theatre Company productions of her verse plays ‘Bluebeard’ (1933) and ‘Cain’ (1945). Her own poor health led the O’Neills to spend a good deal of time on extended holidays in Switzerland and the south of France. In August 1950 they sold their home in Dublin and moved to Nice, where they intended to settle; however, their rapidly depleted finances forced them back to Ireland in April 1951, after which they rented a cottage in Wicklow from their friend Con Curran. After her husband’s death in 1953 she lived in Dublin with relatives, in increasingly poor health, until her own death in 1967.