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  • Chapter 8 - The Eclipse of Dora Sigerson

  • Edited by Ailbhe Darcy, Cardiff University, David Wheatley, University of Aberdeen
  • Book:
    A History of Irish Women's Poetry
    Published online:
    11 June 2021
    Print publication:
    01 July 2021, pp 158-172

  • Summary

    The career of Dora Sigerson (1866–1918), also known as Dora Sigerson Shorter, moves between the worlds of the nineteenth-century nationalist ballad and the Edwardian lyric. Born a year after W. B. Yeats, she established herself on the British literary scene, becoming a friend of Thomas Hardy and reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement by Virginia Woolf, but experienced the Easter Rising as a traumatic call to reconnect with Ireland. A vein of agnostic anxiety runs through her work, which engages with themes of depression, ghostly visitations, and suicide. The poems of her final period move between private and public dramas, aspiring to a monumental framework (Sigerson was also a sculptor) but exploring Anglo-Irish relations through the familiar prism of a strained marriage. Her final work tackles wider themes of imperial wrongs, including slavery, while teetering on the edge of breakdown. Moving as she does between contrasting modes, Sigerson is a poet who has arguably still to find her audience, but whose work has much to tell us about how Irish poetry has been read and received over the last century.