Mary E.L. Butler

Mary E. L. Butler (1874-1920) (Irish: Máire de Buitléir) was an Irish writer and Irish-language activist.

Mary Butler was the daughter of Peter Lambert Butler and the granddaughter of William Butler of Bunnahow, County Clare.[1] She was a close relative of Edward Carson. She was educated at Alexandra College, Dublin. In order to learn Irish she made several visits to the Aran Islands. According to her memoirs, which are in a Benedictine monastery in France, she was converted to the nationalist cause after reading John Mitchel's Jail Journal. From 1899 to 1904 she edited a women's page and also a children's page in the Irish Weekly Independent. She promoted the nationalist cause in both.

She joined the Gaelic League, where she got to know women Irish-language enthusiasts such as Evelyn Donovan, Agnes O'Farrelly and Máire Ní Chinnéide, and spent several years on its executive.[2] She wrote articles that appeared frequently in the League's newspaper, An Claidheamh Soluis, as well as in the United Irishman and in other periodicals.[3] Some were republished as pamphlets.[4]

She published a collection of short stories, A Bundle of Rushes, in 1900. She wrote her first novel, The Ring of Day, in 1906.[5]

In 1907, she married Thomas O'Nolan, who died in 1913. She died in Rome and is buried there.

She was a close friend of Arthur Griffith and in a letter of condolence which Griffith wrote to her sister from Mountjoy Jail in 1920 he states that Mary Butler was the first person to suggest to him the name Sinn Féin as the title of the new organisation which he had founded.[6]

References

  1. ↑ Irish Peasant, 17 March 1906 - Women members of the Coiste Gnótha (the League Executive)
  2. ↑ Agnes O'Farrelly, Smaointe ar Árainn/Thoughts on Aran, ed. Ríona Nic Congáil (2010), p 15
  3. ↑ United Irishman, January 1903
  4. ↑ e.g., "Irishwomen and the Home Language" and "Two Schools: A Contrast."
  5. ↑ The Ring of Day. London: Hutchinson and Company, 1906
  6. ↑ O'Snodaigh, Aengus. "Sinn Féin and Sinn Féin". An Phoblacht/Republican News. Retrieved 19 January 2016.
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