Mary Colum

Mary Colum (June 14, 1884 – October 22, 1957) was an Irish literary critic and author.

Mary Gunning Maguire was born in Collooney, County Sligo, daughter of Charles Maguire, Constable and Catherine Gunning who died in 1895 to be reared by her grandmother Catherine in Ballisodare, Co. Sligo. She attended boarding school in St. Louis' Convent, Monaghan, which she described as a 'self-contained totalitarian state' with standards of 'unselfishness, magnanimity, and devotion to others I rarely found in the world afterwards.'

She continued her studies at Royal University (NUI) Trinity and was founder of the Twilight Literary Society which led her to meet W. B. Yeats. She regularly attended the Abbey Theatre and was a frequent visitor amongst the salons, readings and debates there.

After graduation in 1909 she taught at St Ita's - a companion school to Patrick Pearse's St. Enda's School. She was active with Thomas MacDonagh and others in national and cultural causes. She co-founded The Irish Review (1911-14) with David Houston, Thomas MacDonagh et al. and was encouraged by Yeats to specialise in French literary criticism and to translate Paul Claudel.

A vivid redhead with a wild beauty seldom apparent in photographs, she married Padraic Colum in 1912, moved with him to New York in 1914, living occasionally in London and Paris; became established as a literary generalist in American journals, including Poetry, Scribner's, The Nation, The New Republic, Freeman, the New York Times Review of Books, The Saturday Review of Books, and The Tribune.

She associated with James Joyce in Paris, and discouraged him from duping enquirers about the origins of the interior monologue in the example of Edouard Dujardin. She accepted Joyce's very ill daughter Lucia for a week in their Paris flat at the height of her 'hebephrenic' attack, while herself preparing for an operation in May 1932. She served as the literary editor of The Forum magazine from 1933-41, commenced teaching comparative literature with Padraic at Columbia University in 1941.

She rebutted Oliver St. John Gogarty's intemperate remarks about Joyce in the Saturday Review of Literature in 1941.

Her work of reminiscence "Our Friend James Joyce (1959)", assembled posthumously by Padraic Colum, sensitively recalls the writer; her letters are held in Scribner's Archive, Princeton University Library, while a collection of her papers is held at SUNY.

She was the author of several books, including Life and the Dream, a work that describes an Ireland in twilight and a childhood resplendent of innocence using her artful gift of prose.

Her insight into the leading characters of the Irish Literary Revival at the turn of the 19th and 20th century gives a rare and romantic glimpse into what it must have been like to live in Dublin as new work bubbled like gold out of the cobblestones and walking down Grafton Street might result in bumping into W. B. Yeats mumbling away to himself some verses he was composing mid-air.