Mary Colum

Mary Catherine Gunning Colum (née Maguire; 13 June 1884 – 22 October 1957), who emigrated in 1914 from Ireland to the United States with her husband Padraic Colum, was a journalist, literary critic, memoirist, biographer, feminist, and political activist. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1930 and again in 1938.

Quotes

• Both Joyce and Proust give the same impression, that they have penetrated into reaches of the inner life of men and presented them with far more actuality than has been done before.
  • From These Roots: The Ideas that Have Made Modern Literature. Life and letter series. Charles Scribner's Sons. 1937. p. 356. 

• The last time I saw W. B. Yeats was in June 1938, in his house outside Dublin. He came into the room with his well-remembered, eager step, speaking in his well-remembered, eager voice. But he was changed. Old age that had left him so long untouched was making inroads on his physique. The old energy now came only in flashes. One of his eyes was covered with a black patch; it was blind, and he could use only one eye. ‘We are both changed,’ he said, examining me with his one eye. ‘You were once my ideal of a youthful nihilist.’ ... This was what he used to say to me in my student days when I was so delighted to be Yeats’s ideal of anything that I didn’t care what the word meant. Nihilism was the romantic form of revolt in Yeats’s early days; his friend, Oscar Wilde, had made a first play about Vera, the girl-nihilist. ... I think, vaguely, in his mind it represented a youthful fighting spirit that went with reading Russian novels, French Symbolist poetry, and Nietzsche. To attribute to anyone a fighting spirit was Yeats’s most heartfelt compliment.
  • (February 25, 1939)"Memories of Yeats". Saturday Review of Literature (New York)., reprinted in "Chapter. Memories of Yeats by Mary M. Colum". W. B. Yeats. London: Palgrave. pp. 241–246. doi:10.1007/978-1-349-02995-2_12.  (edited by E. H. Mikhail)

Quotes about Mary M. Colum

• ... In 1911, she established the monthly intellectual journal the Irish Review, with Padraic Colum, David Houston, Thomas McDonagh, and James Stephens. As an editor, Collum published her own articles, as well as work by Pearse, George Russell, and Hanna Sheehy Skeffington, until the Review ceased publication in 1914. Along with Maud Gonne and other women nationalists, she also helped found Cumann na mBan, an auxiliary of the Irish Volunteers, and fought for women's suffrage.
  • Paige Reynolds, "Mary (Catherine Gunning Maguire) Colum (1884-1957)". Irish Women Writers: An A-to-Z Guide. 2006. pp. 69–72.  (quote from p. 69; edited by Alexander G. Gonzalez)

External links

• Biography. marycolum.com.
• Bibliography. marycolum.com.