Born: 26 August 1875, Ireland
Died: 31 March 1910
Country most active: United States
Also known as: NA
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.
Kelly, Myra (Teresa) (1875–1910), writer and teacher, daughter of the surgeon Dr James Edward Kelly and Annie Kelly (née Morrogh), was born 26 August 1875 at her father’s residence, 2 Gardiner’s Row, Dublin. The family moved to New York city, where her father built up a successful practice. Having received her education in several New York public schools, she went on to attend the teachers’ college at Columbia University, from which she qualified in 1899. A two-year appointment at PS 147, a public primary school located on the city’s east side, where she worked among the immigrant community, provided her with much of the material for her stories. She began writing while she was employed (1902–3) as a teaching supervisor at the Speyer School teachers’ college. Speyer was a highly innovative grade school linked to Columbia at the heart of the ‘settlement house’ project, which aimed to establish social programmes in disadvantaged communities. During Kelly’s time there, she would have experienced working in a school with better facilities than city-run schools: showers for the pupils, a gym, a roof garden, and a library available to the local community.
She appears to have found no difficulty in getting her stories accepted, and claimed that none of her manuscripts had ever been rejected by a publisher. After contributing to magazines, including McClure’s, in 1904 she published A Christmas present for a lady, whose characters were the impoverished children of eastern European and Jewish immigrants, and her first collection of tales, Little citizens: the humors of school life. This work so impressed her future husband, Allan Macnaughtan , president of the Standard Coach Horse Co., that on reading it he sought to meet her. They married in November 1905 and had one son, who died in infancy. Among the most popular of her later publications were The isle of dreams (1907) and Wards of liberty (1907). The latter included the short story ‘In loco parentis’, which so moved President Theodore Roosevelt that he wrote to congratulate her; the letter was reprinted as a foreword in later editions. In 1909 she wrote a pamphlet, The American public school as a factor in international conciliation, for the American Association for International Conciliation. Other works include Rosnah (1908), with an Irish heiress as its central character; New faces (1910); and Little aliens (1928).
Her husband’s efforts to establish a writers’ colony in Oldchester, Orange Mountain, New Jersey, about 1907 proved disastrous, and brought about his bankruptcy. She contracted tuberculosis soon afterwards. In an effort to improve her health she and her husband moved to Torquay, Devon, England, where she died 31 March 1910.