1/8/2024 0 Comments Jane wilde ones![]() All avenues to wealth and rank are closed to them. At present they have neither dignity nor position. Women truly need much to be done for them. Throughout her life, Jane was bitter in her condemnation of the neglect of women. Duffy revived it after the failed rising of 1848 and Jane wrote a poem to mark the occasion but she had lost her fire and turned her attention to a fight for gender equality instead. In ‘The Exodus’, she lamented the ‘million a decade’ forced to flee.Īs conditions worsened, Jane became increasingly provocative and her unsigned editorial ‘Jacta Alea Est’(the die is cast), an unmistakable call-to-arms, prompted the suppression of The Nation. In ‘The Famine Year’, she condemned the arrival of ‘stately ships to bear our food away’. In ‘The Voice of the Poor’, she railed against the horror: ‘before us die our brothers of starvation’, she wrote. In famine-stricken Ireland, Jane’s words had a galvanizing effect. In his memoir Four Years of Irish History, Duffy recognised in her ‘the spirit of Irish liberty embodied in a stately and beautiful woman’. The impetus for her decision to write for The Nation newspaper, the organ of the revolutionary Young Irelander movement, was the death of Thomas Davis, one of the movement’s leaders.Ĭharles Gavan Duffy, editor of The Nation, invited contributions from sympathetic readers and was particularly impressed by the fiery poetry he received from Jane, who wrote as Speranza and signed her letters John Fanshaw Ellis. Until her early twenties, Jane lived quietly with her widowed mother and declared herself ‘quite indifferent to the national movement’ in Ireland. Till my eighteenth year I never wrote anything. I succeeded in mastering ten of the European languages. In an interview she gave towards the end of her life, she recalled her studious nature: ‘I was always very fond of study, and of books,’ she said. He admired her considerable intellect and her insatiable appetite for life.Īlthough, as a child, Jane was exceptionally bright and eager to learn, she had no access to formal education and was obliged to teach herself. A poet, an essayist, an accomplished linguist, a wit, a beauty, a very loving wife and mother, and a campaigner for liberty and women’s rights, she brought Oscar up to believe that a woman could be just as creative and intelligent as a man. Jane Wilde was an exceptionally noble woman who had a profound influence on her son’s work and on his character. Oscar renamed his play Lady Windermere’s Fan. ![]() “A Noble Woman” would be better,’ she insisted. When Lady Jane Wilde (1821-1896) learned that her son Oscar’s latest play had the provisional title ‘A Good Woman’, she wrote to express her disapproval: ‘I do not like it- “A Good Woman”. ![]()
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