Mary Tighe

Mary Tighe (9 October 1772 – 24 March 1810) was an Irish poet. Life and career Mary Blackford (or Blanchford) was born in Dublin, 9 October 1772. Her parents were Theodosia Tighe, a Methodist leader, and William Blachford (d.1773?), a Church of Ireland clergyman and librarian. She had a strict religious upbringing, and when she was twenty-one she married Henry Tighe (1768–1836), her first cousin and a member of the Parliament of Ireland for Inistioge, County Kilkenny. The marriage is said to have been unhappy, though little is known. The couple moved to London in the early nineteenth century. She became acquainted with Thomas Moore, an early admirer of her writing, and others interested in literature. Although she had written since girlhood, she published nothing until Psyche (1805), a six-canto allegorical poem in Spenserian stanzas. Psyche was admired by many and praised by Moore in his poem, "To Mrs. Henry Tighe on reading her Psyche". Having suffered for at least a year, Mary Tighe endured a serious attack of tuberculosis in 1805. In February 1805 Moore states that she had "a very serious struggle for life" and in August of the same year that she was 'ordered to the Madeiras'. Moore also claimed that "another winter will inevitably be her death". Tighe lived for another five years and spent her last few months as an invalid at her brother-in-law's estate in Woodstock, County Kilkenny, Ireland. She was buried in the church at nearby Inistioge. Her diary was destroyed, though a cousin had copied out excerpts.