Untitled Document

      Ella Young, born in Co. Antrim, grew up in Dublin where she studied Law and Political Science at the Royal University. She joined the Theosophy Society and later, the Hermetic Society which included at that time, W. B. Yeats, and George Russell among its members. After college, Young lived in western Ireland where she studied Irish. In 1906, she published her first volume of poetry, Poems, and in 1909, her first volume of folk tales, The Coming of Lugh. The following year her Celtic Wonder Tales was published.

     Young joined Sinn Fien in 1912 and in 1914, while sharing an apartment with Maud Gonne, she became a founding member of Cumann na mBan. She was active in Cumann na mBan during the 1916 Easter rising and during the War of Independence when she smuggled guns for the republicans. Young opposed the Anglo-Irish Treaty and fought on the republican side during the Irish Civil War. She was imprisoned by the Irish free state in Mountjoy Gaol and in the North Dublin Union Internment Camp. On her release, Young immigrated to the United States where she became a lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley.

     The first degree-granting program in Celtic language and literature in the U.S. began in the academic year, 1911-1912 at the University of California, Berkeley. Young, then a highly regarded Irish poet, was hired in 1924 as the James D. Phelan Lecturer in Irish Myth and Lore. She taught in that position for a decade.

     In 1929, Young published a series of short stories based on the Fenian Cycle of Irish mythology entitiled The Tangle-Coated Horse. Her poem, The Red Sunrise (Moraig's Song) was first published in the Red Hand Magazine, in 1920. She also published many volumes of short stories for children, the best remembered is The Unicorn with Silver Shoes (1932). Her memoirs, Flowering Dusk, were published in 1945.

Sponsored by
Mike's Liquors
415-587-5000