Eileen Duggan

Eileen May Duggan OBE (born May 21, 1894 in Tuamarina , Blenheim , Marlborough District , South Island , New Zealand , † December 10, 1972 in Wellington ) was a New Zealand poet and writer .

Life

Origin, studies and teacher

Eileen Duggan was the daughter of John Duggan, who worked as a rail installer for New Zealand Railways (NZRC), and his wife Julia Begley, who came from County Kerry in Ireland . During her childhood she lived in a cottage that her father had built in Tuamarina, a small farming community on the northern edge of the Wairau Plains and surrounded by the hills, bushes and marshes of the nearby Wairau River . This landscape, in which she found numerous amusements, had a strong influence on her poetry in the 1920s and 1930s, which she later described as follows: “To be asked to write about Tua Marina is almost like a question about yourself to write yourself “('To be asked to write of Tua Marina is almost like a request to write on self').

She first attended Tuamarina Elementary School and after winning a national youth scholarship between 1907 and 1910, Marlborough High School . On her return she worked from 1912 to 1913 first as a student teacher at her old elementary school and then began studying at the Teachers' Training College in Wellington in 1914 , before studying at Victoria University College from 1915 to 1917 . She graduated in 1917 with a Bachelor of Arts (BA) in Latin , Education , English and the History of England . She completed a subsequent postgraduate course in history in 1918 with a Master of Arts (MA) with the highest distinction. She then took up a job as a teacher at Dannevirke High School , which she had to give up again in 1919 for health reasons.

Family blows of fate and own illness from Parkinson's

After that, Eileen Duggan worked as a full-time writer from 1919, but suffered numerous family blows in the early 1920s. First, her older sister Evelyn Duggan, her closest childhood confidante, died of nephritis in 1921 . In 1923, her parents, with whom she lived, died within a few months. After that she lived temporarily with her eldest sister Mary Duggan, but mostly in a Catholic hostel in Wellington , where she met Julia McLeely, who became her friend and companion for the rest of her life.

In 1926 Eileen Duggan worked briefly as a teacher at St Patrick's College in Wellington before she took up a year as an assistant lecturer at Victoria University College. She referred to this appointment in a letter to the Australian author Nettie Palmer as her "Land of Egypt and House of Bondage". The outbreak of Parkinson's disease again forced her to give up teaching. She then led a separate, but not withdrawn, life in Wellington. After her sister Mary Duggan was widowed in 1931, she lived with her and Julia McLeely. For Eileen Duggan, who was a shy, sensitive woman with blue eyes and red and gold hair, persistent sickness and general weakness were the reasons for the rejection of two proposals. But her decision may also have been influenced by her idea of ​​an artistic calling that she believed could not be combined with marriage.

Author, poet, essayist and journalist

In 1931 she already had a recognized reputation as an author and published regularly texts on historical or literary topics, short stories and a weekly column entitled "The Catholic Woman" in The New Zealand Tablet , which she wrote under the pseudonym "Pippa" since 1927 . Under this pseudonym she was well known in the Catholic community of New Zealand and also gained importance as the author of occasional poems for special events in the church year . In many of her texts she has supported work for religious congregations and charities and has also worked as an essayist and journalist with articles in The Sun , The Press in Christchurch , The Bulletin in Sydney , The New English Weekly in London and Commonweal in New York City .

Her greatest literary fame among a large community in New Zealand and overseas was her work as a poet. While studying at the Teachers' Training College in Wellington, she began writing poetry, which had appeared in The New Zealand Tablet since 1917 . Between 1922 and 1951 she published five anthologies , two of which appeared in subsequent editions and three major works appeared simultaneously in England and the USA . Despite her calm lifestyle, she continued her fruitful correspondence, particularly with a large number of literary figures in New Zealand, Australia and England.

Eileen Duggan's early poetry reflected her Irish ancestry, and its publication coincided with growing local support for Irish self-government. When she turned down the possibility of a trip to Ireland in the mid-1920s, she devoted herself more clearly to New Zealand and its literature. This was evident in the simple but popular verses of the New Zealand Bird Songs , in attempts to combine the traditions of the Māori and Maori languages in their texts, in popular ballads dealing with the lives of ordinary workers in rural New Zealand , as well as in intense personal poems that played in vividly realized landscapes. Throughout her writing career, she has been conscious of writing in a community with few literary traditions of its own.

Her poetry is characterized by its conspicuous religious dimension, which ranged from simple devotional text design, to poems that portray the holiness of the world created by God, to more lacking and gloomy meditations on the moral effects of human action.

Awards and last years of life

Eileen Duggan, who was awarded the Officer's Cross of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 1937 , was the first New Zealand female poet to gain international recognition. In 1939 she was accepted into the Gallery of Living Catholic Authors and in 1943 Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature . In August 1942, Prime Minister Peter Fraser of the New Zealand Labor Party government awarded her a state pension for financial support .

After 1951 she published no further poems, which was connected with the upheaval in the New Zealand cultural landscape and a change in literary fashion, but also with the lack of sympathy for the critical judgments of Allen Curnow in his influential anthologies. After lengthy and difficult negotiations in the late 1950s, she rejected the use of any work in the Penguin Anthology of New Zealand Verse published by Curnow in 1960 . Afterwards she limited herself to historical and religious writings.

Eileen Duggan died on December 10, 1972 at Calvary Hospital in Wellington.

Publications

Volumes of poetry

• Poems , 1921
• New Zealand Bird Songs , 1929
• Poems , 1937/1939
• New Zealand Poems , 1940
• More Poems , 1951

posthumous publications

• Selected poems , 1994

Other publications

• Papers Re Eileen Duggan , co-author Grace Mary Burgess, 1915
• In the Savage South Solomons , 1932
• 1874-1934, Francis Redwood, SM, Abp. of Wellington , 1934
• Dedication , 1938
• James Cook of Marton , 1939
• Wellington in Verse and Picture , 1940
• Centenary: Sisters of Mercy, Wellington; 1861-1961 , 1961
• Sisters of the Missions Golden Jubilee, 1912-1962, Lower Hutt , 1962
• New Zealand , co-author Patrick Joseph Corish, 1971

Background literature

• Peggy Gaddis: Eileen Duggan , 1952
• Francis Michael McKay: Eileen Duggan , Wellington, 1977
• G. Burgess: A gentle poet , Carterton, 1981
• P. Whiteford: Introduction to Selected poems by E. Duggan , Wellington, 1994
• M. Leggott: Opening the archive: Robin Hyde, Eileen Duggan and the persistence of record , in: Opening the book . Ed. M. Williams & M. Leggott. Auckland, 1995

Web links

• Peter Whiteford: Duggan, Eileen May , in: Dictionary of New Zealand Biography. Te Ara - the Encyclopedia of New Zealand , updated October 30, 2012, accessed March 25, 2015
• Biography in New Zealand Book Council
• Biography in The Prow
• Excerpts of poetry in NZTEC
• Bibliography in the Open Library
• Bibliography in Google Books