Eileen Shanahan was born in Sandymount, Co. Dublin. Educated at St Catherine's Dominican Convent, Sion Hill, and later at Alexandra College, she worked as a secretary in Dublin from 1919 to 1929, when she applied for a secretarial post with the League of Nations at Geneva. She wrote around 70 poems, but just eleven of these were published in her lifetime. In spite of this relatively small output, Shanahan exhibits a rhythmic assurance and a keen sensory awareness in her work. Her first publishing success came as a teenager: two of her poems appeared in the Clonmel Nationalist in 1921. Most of the poems that would later be anthologised were written during the 1920s, when Shanahan still lived in Dublin. She appears to have stopped writing entirely during the period in which she was raising her family, but resumed in her mid-sixties and continued until her death in 1979. Just one poem—‘The Colonel's Wife’—is included here from this late period. From 1940 onward, Shanahan lived in Wallington, Surrey.