Mary Blachford Tighe: ‘No Haunting Dream’

Abstract

The poetry of Mary Tighe (1772–1810) has undergone a more dramatic fall into obscurity than that of any other woman poet of the Romantic period. Shortly after her death, Blackwood’s Magazine ranked her alongside Joanna Baillie and Felicia Hemans: ‘Scotland has her Baillie—Ireland her Tighe—and England her Hemans’. Today, only Psyche: or the Legend of Love, is widely known as Keats borrowed from it in writing ‘The Eve of St Agnes’ and ‘Ode to Psyche’. Chronology, geography, and gender determined both the rise and subsequent fall of Tighe’s literary reputation. Her untimely death meant that the first widely circulated edition of her poems was overseen by her mother and brother-in-law, who wished to represent her character as that of a devout, cultured lady. Mary Tighe can now be recognised as a poet with a wide range, including the political and satirical as well as the descriptive and meditative; her work illustrates Jo Gill’s view that poetry by women frequently rejects such binaries as ‘public’ versus ‘private’, and ‘political’ versus ‘personal’.