Tighe, Mary Blachford

(1772-1810)

   Mary Blachford was born in Dublin, the daughter of a clergyman who died when she was one year old. Her mother was one of the women who took a prominent part in the Methodist movement in Ireland. Mary married her cousin, Henry Tighe, in 1793, but the marriage was not a happy one. She began writing, and her poem Psyche or the Legend of Love, which was printed privately in 1805, had many admirers, receiving high praise in The Quarterly Review, and is believed to have influenced John Keats's (see entry) poem of the same name. Charlotte Yong, the Hampshire novelist (1823-1901), in the preface to Love and Life: An Old Story in Eighteenth Century Costume (1880) (the novel is a version of the Cupid and Psyche legend, set in eighteenth-century England) makes reference to Tighe's Psyche. She died of tuberculosis and was buried at Inistioge, County Kilkenny. Some of her other poems: "1802," "A Faithful Friend is the Medicine of Life," "Acrostics," "Address to My Harp," "Bryan Byrne, of Glenmalure," "Calm Delight," "The Eclipse, Jan. 24, 1804," "When the Bitter Source of Sorrow."

   Sources: A Century of Sonnets: The Romantic-Era Revival 1750-1850. Paula R. Feldman and Daniel Robinson, eds. Oxford University Press, 1999. Dictionary of National Biography. Electronic Edition 1.1. Oxford University Press, 1997. English Poetry: Author Search. Chadwyck-Healey Ltd., 1995 (http://www.lib.utexas.edu:8080/search/epoetry/author.html). The National Portrait Gallery (www. npg.org.uk). Oldpoetry (www.oldpoetry.com). Psyche: or, the Legend of Love, Mary Blachford Tighe (http://web.nmsu.edu/Tighe, Mary Blachfordhlinkin/Psyche/). The Collected Poems and Journals of Mary Tighe. University Press of Kentucky, 2005. The Columbia Granger's Index to Poetry. 11th ed. The Columbia Granger's World of Poetry, Columbia University Press, 2005 (http://www.columbiagrangers.org).