Katharine Tynan is the most prolific of the women writers included here. Encouraged as a child by her father to attend plays and political meetings, she became, like him, an ardent nationalist. Her literary talents were also fostered by him and in her late teens she began submitting poems to such journals as Young Ireland, Irish Fireside and Irish Monthly. Her first volume of verse, Louise de la Vallière and Other Poems (1885) was well received but it was with her second collection Shamrocks (1887) that she entered fully into the spirit of the Gaelic Revival, with which she would be closely associated. Her friendship with W. B. Yeats resulted in the publication of Poems and Ballads of Young Ireland (1888), which would prove a formative Revivalist text. In the same year Tynan met her future husband, Henry Hinkson, though it would be five years before they married. The move to England necessitated by their union brought Tynan into contact with British literary circles and she became a prolific freelance journalist for such publications as Pall Mall Gazette and the Illustrated London News, as well as for the American Boston Pilot, which published other figures associated with the Revival. She continued to publish poetry through - out this period. She returned to Ireland in 1911, when her husband was made resident magistrate in Castlebar, Co. Mayo, but was dismayed by the radicalism of Ireland at this time. Her loyalties became increasingly divided between Britain and Ireland: her sons’ involvement in the First World War left her with little sympathy for the rebels of Easter Week. Herpoetry reveals her engagement with English influences and material, but many of her poems were fundamentally personal, though not confessional in nature. For the twenty-first-century reader there may seem little that is formally distinctive about Tynan's work: rhythm and rhyme are uncomplicated and her use of familiar phrases and rhetorical questions limits her poetry's capacity for surprise. The sensory detail of her writing is impressive, however, and her capacity to express the emotional resonance of human experiences remains affecting.