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Around
1825, the girl who was to be known to the world as 'Eva' was born in Killeen
near Portumna, East Galway.
Christened Mary Anne Kelly, she was the daughter of a wealthy
gentleman-farmer with nationalist
sympathies. At the age of only fifteen, this precocious child sent her
first
verse to Gavin Duffy, founder of The
Nation.
Down Britannia,
brigand down!
No more to rule with
sceptred hand:
Truth raises o’er thy
throne and crown
Her exorcising wand
 Mary took
the initial pen-name of
Fionnuala, before becoming ‘Eva’, the name by which
she is best known today.
Within three years of sending her first poems to Duffy, the young girl
had become
romantically involved with another Young Irelander,
‘Saint’ Kevin Izod
O’Doherty, a lawyer’s son and assistant surgeon who
had begun his medical
career treating fever victims. According to his later description on a
prison
ship, O’Doherty was nearly six feet tall, with a fresh
complexion, brown hair
and whiskers, a broad forehead and a small chin. Pat ‘Nicaragua’
Smyth, a fellow Young Irelander, described Eva as ‘tall, with
daydreamy eyes
and wonderful black hair reaching to her knees’. The young
writer had come to
Dublin to visit Gavin Duffy and John Martin in prison, chaperoned by a
Miss
Bruton,. While staying at Killeen House, Eva witnessed the escape of
John Blake
Dillon to America.
‘He had only gone off a short time when we were that night
invaded by police
and the magistrate. Our house was ransacked from top to
bottom.’.
Kevin
O’Doherty was also on trial
for sedition; in his defence, his lawyer Isaac Butt claimed his
‘nerves were
shocked’ after working in the fever sheds. The jury were
unable to reach a
verdict. Ultimately, Lord Clarendon sent a priest to encourage
O’Doherty to
plead guilty, sparing him from judgment, but after speaking to Eva in
the
garden at Richmond, he decided to stay true to his principles, in
return for
which she would be true to him. He was consequently sentenced to ten
years
transportation, packed off so abruptly in June 1849 that he never had
the time
to write a farewell letter to Eva.
Eva
was still in Galway
when the United Irelanders were convicted under the
Treason/Felony Act,
which had made it illegal to state publicly that the Union
between Ireland
and Great Britain
might one day be dissolved. Her response ran:
For one – for two –
for three –
Aye! Hundreds,
thousands, see!
For vengeance and for
thee
To the last!
In
July, Gavin Duffy was arrested
under the New Felony Act for articles in the Nation
which demanded ‘blood for blood’ and called on
Irishmen not
to let ‘this moment for retribution… pass by
unemployed’. Eva had contributed a
poem to this edition, casting Thomas Meaghar as ‘Silken
Thomas’ on the model of
the original rebel, the Earl of Kildare. ‘Our silken Thomas
may be seen, all
glorious from afar.’
The
Nation
was revived in September 1849, still under the leadership of Gavin
Duffy. Eva’s poems conveyed her sense of loss for
‘Saint’ Kevin:
How I glory, how I
sorrow,
How I love with
deathless love,
How I weep before the
chilling skies,
And moan to God
above!
She
continued to write for
O’Doherty when he had arrived in Australia
and could receive copies of her verse:
Yes, pale one in thy
sorrow - yes, wrong’d one in thy pain
This heart has still
a beat for thee – this trembling hand a strain.
Come, wild deer of
the mountainside! Come, sweet bird of the plain!
To cheer the cold and
trembling heart that beats for thee in vain!
Oh! Come, from woe,
and cold, and gloom, to her who’s warm and true,
And has no hope or
throb for aught within this world but you.
O’Doherty
remained completely true
to Eva. John Mitchel described him as ‘sometimes gloomy and
desponding and the
mood is on him for a few minutes. There dwells in Ireland (I should
have known
it well, though he had never told me), a dark-eyed lady, a fair and
gentle
lady, with hair like the blackest midnight; and in the tangle of those
silken
tresses she has bound my poor friend’s soul; round the solid
hemisphere has
held him and he drags like a lingering chain.’ After his
early release from his
sentence in 1854, he stayed in Australia
for a while to visit the goldfields in Victoria,
possibly to accrue some capital before marriage. In March 1855, he
travelled
illegally back to Britain
on the James Baines. He was spotted
by a doctor from Ballarat, Alfred Carr, who was determined to tell the
Home
Office of O’Doherty’s arrival; but
O’Doherty was still able to reach Ireland,
where he picked up his inheritance and planned his marriage to Eva. In
July,
the Sub-Inspector of police at Galway
let Dublin
Castle
know that ‘it was whispered
abroad that a strange gentleman was staying with the Kelly
family.’ Eva’s
parents helped the young couple travel to London
and then to Liverpool, where they
were married on August
23rd in Moorfields Chapel. The pair then moved
on to Paris.
Gavin Duffy wrote to O’Doherty that ‘a man going to
marry his first love and
then to live in Paris
has nothing
to desire in the world’. They would later undergo a second
marriage at
the British Consul, to give their children civil legitimacy.
John
Martin, Eva’s mentor, was also
living in Paris.
Eva spent many
evenings with him, and would later write that ‘of all the
friends I have known,
none have been more genuinely or delicately kind’ than he.
A
week before Eva was due to give
birth for the first time, she and her husband returned to Dublin
via Liverpool. The child was a boy,
who they called
William. At the time of the birth, O’Doherty was still in
hiding, but within
only a fortnight an unconditional pardon for himself, William Smith
O’Brien and
John Martin was granted. The family could then live openly in Ireland.
Eva and William returned to Killeen
in East Galway while Kevin studied
for exams to become a
surgeon.
However,
all was not completely
well. The relationship between the O’Dohertys and
Kevin’s two brothers was strained.
The brothers failed to share Kevin and Eva’s spiritual and
political ideals.
Eva wrote to John Martin in 1857, complaining that:
‘[William] is still
persisting in the course he first adopted – the irritation
this man is causing
[Kevin], I know, is one cause of his being ill… John I
scarcely blame, for he
is passive – a mere tool in his brother’s hands
– the women are small and
spiteful’. Despite the tensions at home, Kevin went on to
become a Fellow at
the Royal College of Surgeons, working as a medical practitioner and a
lecturer
in anatomy and physiology. Eva, meanwhile, suffered under the dull
reality and
physical strain of her life as wife and mother. By August 1858 she had
given
birth to a second son, Edward. She wrote to John Martin complaining of ‘many tormenting
troubles of the mean and
earthy sort which, by the way, more acutely try a body more inclined to
live in
the moon apart from such influences, than even the sable woes of
tragedy.’ The
following year she became a mother for the third time, to a boy named
Vincent.
Fortunately she still had some outlet for her writing,
paid a pound a page by ‘Lietch Ritchie,
Messrs Chambers’ literary hack’.
Eva
was pregnant with a fourth
son, Kevin, when she and her husband left Ireland
by boat for Australia,
where he was to work as a physician. The family stayed with friends in Melbourne
while her husband went ahead to Sydney
to open his consultancy. Eva joined him in 1861, and continued to write
poems
about her yearning for the homeland.
O Ireland of the springtime
fairest!
O Ireland of the
murmuring streams!
…Across that waste of
waters shining,
The exile flees to
thee again!
O’Doherty
would become a surgeon
of renown, working with the Brisbane Volunteer Rifle Corp. He was to be
a
public health reformer of some influence, and honorary surgeon at the Ipswich
Hospital
and the Hospital for Sick
Children. In 1867 he was elected to the Queensland Legislative
Assembly; five
years later, he promoted the first Public Health Act to become law in Queensland. Time did not pass quite so
comfortably for
Eva. Living in a rough wooden house and coping with sweltering heat,
she gave
birth to another two children, neither of whom survived their first
year. While
Kevin was prepared to drink the Loyal Toast, at dinner parties, Eva
remained
more true to her original principles, and kept pace with Irish and
Fenian
politics through her contacts by John Martin. She spent her days
running stalls
to raise funds for hospitals and school. When James Stephens founded
his Fenian
newspaper, The Irish People, in
1863,
Eva sent a poem:
Oh! Ye dead, – ye
well beloved dead!
Great souls, fond
hearts, that once were linked with mine,
Across the gulf that
yawns between us dread,
I fling the longings
that invite a sign –
a faint, faint shadow
of your presence.
However,
a prominent writer at the People,
Thomas
Clarke Luby, believed the role of women at the paper should be limited.
In his view, ‘the influence of woman appears in its
grandest form, when a true and noble housewife endeavours to sustain
and cheer,
in the dark hour of trial and discouragement, the hopes and faiths of
her
husband.’ Devoid of chances to be heard, Eva settled with
supporting her
husband in his medical and political careers. She pitied the
‘poor Fenians, who
are now breaking stones in the jails of England
or pining in the jails of Ireland’.
Her husband lost interest for a time in Irish nationalism, devoting
himself
instead to campaigning against ‘blackbirding’
– the brutal practice of
enslaving Melanasians on the cotton and cane-sugar plantations of Queensland.
His interest was rekindled after sectarian riots in a town called Warwick,
where Orange supporters attacked
the followers of the
successful Catholic candidate. O’Doherty and two Protestant
friends founded the
Hibernian Society, which encouraged tolerance rather than radicalism:
‘Here’,
said O’Doherty, ‘the British constitution is not an
empty name’.
The
sons of Eva and Kevin were
keen sportsmen, with William taking first place in a skiff at the Brisbane
regatta in 1873. Kevin junior would one day play rugby for Queensland.
There was also a daughter, Gertrude.
By
1875, the couple’s politics
had changed sufficiently to allow them to celebrate the centenary of a
man
O’Doherty had once rebelled against, Daniel
O’Connell. Eva wrote a poem to be
chanted in St. Stephen’s cathedral:
Led by his prophet
might
Rose ye to manhood’s
height,
Flashing the sword of
right,
Forth
from its sheath!
Two
years later, while Kevin
O’Doherty was promoting another Public Health Bill in the
Queensland
Parliament, Eva had gone travelling with the two eldest sons, William
and
Edward. William was to study dentistry in Philadelphia
while Edward took on medicine in Dublin.
Eva was given a welcome by the San
Francisco Monitor who called her ‘Eva of the Nation’, and she went on to
publish a book of verses, which she
dedicated to ‘the Felons John Mitchell and John
Martin’. Most of the poems took Ireland
as
their subject matter, although one was dedicated to Queensland:
But ah! Upon the
bright expanse,
The glory of a clime
Elysian,
‘Tis but a cold and
soulless glance
That meets the
gazer’s vision.
O’Doherty
continued his support
for Irish affairs, running an Irish Land League in Brisbane
and raising funds for the famine of 1879. By this time the family were
wealthy,
living in a villa known as ‘Frascati’ after an area
in Dublin.
Kevin and Edward worked from the house as doctors, William as a
dentist. Sadly,
their good fortune was not to last when the older Kevin once again
became
involved in politics, throwing his weight behind the campaign for Home
Rule.
Visiting Ireland,
he was granted the Freedom of the City of Dublin
and was honoured by a banquet attended by Charles Stewart Parnell. In
1886, O'Doherty
was present at the House of Commons for the reading of the Home Rule
Bill.
Eventually, he was forced to return to his practice in Australia
for financial reasons, where he found that constant attacks from the
local
press had eroded its value. Eva was to comment later that supporting
Parnell
‘was a very losing game for a professional man, but the
doctor was not one to
count the cost.’
The
following year O’Doherty took
up a post in the hardy gold-mining town of Croydon,
North Queensland, but Eva did
not accompany him.
Returning later to the family, their financial circumstances paired
with a world
recession forced them to sell the house. Tainted by his Home Rule
connections,
O’Doherty found himself struggling to earn sufficient money.
Eventually the Queensland
government stepped in by granting him three part-time medical roles.
His
passion for public health remained, and he was still campaigning for it
in
1893, promoting the establishment of a colonial Board of Health.
Tragedy
was soon to catch up with
the family. Vincent, a manager at the National Bank, was killed in a
street
accident in 1890. Two years later, Edward’s four-year-old
daughter died, and
William passed away not long afterwards. The younger Kevin and Edward
both died
in 1900 – Kevin of pneumonia and Edward in an accident. Only
one of Eva’s eight
children remained – the daughter, Gertrude. During this time,
the elderly
couple were living in a Brisbane
boarding house, where Kevin worked on a process to restore and preserve
previously frozen meat. He applied for a patent for his invention, but
it was
not enough to help the family financially. The couple then moved to a
suburb
called Rosalie, in Queensland,
to
live in a wood-framed house on stilts. Kevin’s eyesight
failed, but he was
fortunate enough to be supported by three young colleagues, who took on
his
cases and gave him the fees. After his death in 1905, at the age of 81,
Eva was
to struggle on for another five years. She had only her daughter to
rely on,
who brought home a meagre wage as a state typist.
Nonetheless,
Eva was still a
woman of strong passions. She was offended that the Redmond
brothers had not sent a message of consolation on the death of her
husband,
which was particularly irksome as William Redmond was in Queensland
at the time. By good fortune she came to the attention of a priest,
Father
Hickey, who helped her to publish a book of her poetry, and then
encouraged her
to write sketches of the Young Irelanders and their champions,
including the
poets Mary and Speranza who had also written for the Nation.
In Eva’s view, the Rising had been
‘misnamed’ – ‘No rising.
No plans or order – no leader. The hour had come in all
probability, but not the man.
Certainly there was one
man who had been suffered to be seized as a felon – John
Mitchel – who held
practical views.’ She always believed that the opportunity
had come when John Mitchel
was led through the streets of Dublin
as a prisoner, igniting public outrage. ‘The people were then
ready – filled
with rage and enthusiasm. They were held back by their
leaders.’
Eva
also claimed herself to be
the writer of the treasonable articles Alea
Jacta Est and The Tocsin of Ireland. By implication, the other women
writers had been cowardly for not owning up to the articles they had
written. She
was also scathing about Gavin Duffy, who had earlier seemed to her full
of
‘abounding vitality’, but who later passed through
‘the mill of modern social
conventionalism’. Also mentioned was Lucy O’Brien,
wife of William, who had
been angered by Eva’s articles about her husband’s
poor health in Australia.
The
book of poems sold well;
Father Hicky commented that ‘you have, I think, left to the
reading world of
your countrymen a work that will last many year and a day.’
Money was also
raised for Eva within several Irish communities in Australia,
including a ‘Eva of the Nation’
fund
in Queensland.
Eva’s
memoirs were still
unfinished when she died from influenza in May 1910, aged eighty. She
was
buried alongside her husband under a monument paid for by the Irish
community,
with the inscription:
Physician and muse,
man and wife!
They came from Ireland’s
shores.
Through adversity
their light shone brightly,
Inspiring all on whom
it shone.
Monument to Kevin and Eva at Toowong Cemetery in Brisbane
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