Katharine Tynan

Sir, - Was it due solely to pressure of space that Professor Kiberd's article (July 14th) omitted to mention Katharine Tynan …

Sir, - Was it due solely to pressure of space that Professor Kiberd's article (July 14th) omitted to mention Katharine Tynan Hinkson (1859-1931) among Irish poets and writers who supplemented their living by writing for the press?Apart from her literary output - 18 collections of poetry, two antholgies, five plays, seven books of devotion, 105 popular novels, 12 collections of short stories and five volumes of autobiography - she was a prodigious contributor to newspapers, magazines and journals in Ireland, Britain and America.Katharine was a close friend and contemporary of W. B. Yeats and George Russell. AE described her as "the earliest singer in that awakening of our imagination which has been spoken of as the Irish Renaissance". Yeats and Russell, among other leading lights, were regular visitors to the Tynan home, White Hall, between Clondalkin and Tallaght, in the closing decades of the last century. White Hall ranks as the genius loci of the Irish literary revival.For the record, Katharine's youngest sister, Nora Tynan O'Mahony (1866-1954), also was a poet and writer. From 1918 until the paper ceased publication in 1923, she was woman's editor of the Weekly Freeman's Journal. - Yours, etc.,Peter Tynan O'Mahony, The Tynan Society,Ballyman,Bray,Co Wicklow.