Alice Curtayne
Alice Curtayne (1898–1981) was an Irish author and lecturer. She was born on 6 Nov 1898, 2 Upper Castle St, Tralee, Co. Kerry. She was daughter of John Curtayne, "carriage builder", or "coach builder", of Castle St, Tralee, by his wife Bridget Mary O'Dwyer.
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She was educated at St. Anne's, Southampton. Married Stephen Rynne with two sons and two daughters.
Her first book was St Catherine of Siena (1929). After Catherine of Siena (1929) she wrote several works of nationalist history including a life of Patrick Sarsfield (1934).[1] The novel House of Cards (1940) concerns an Irish girl who marries an Italian industrialist.
Alice lectured extensively in the USA including at least three trans-American tours.
She gave the Medora A. Feehan Lectures in Irish History and Literature at Anna Maria College, Paxton Massachusetts U.S.A. in the Spring semester of 1959. The College awarded her an honorary Doctorate in Humane Letters and she was presented with the Key to Worcester City by Mayor James D. O'Brien.
In December 1954 The Irish Press sent her to Rome to write daily reports on the close of The Marian Year. She went to Rome again fro the final session of the Second Vatican Council. She was commissioned to send weekly reports to the local newspapers The Carlow Nationalist and The Kerryman. She also sent a series of Profiles of outstanding personages of this Vatican Council to "The Universe" and an article for "Hibernia" journal.
Bibliography
Her works, chiefly biographical, include
- St. Catherine of Siena (1929),
- A Recall to Dante
- Labours in the Vineyard (a translation from the Italian Giovanni Papini)
- Saint Brigid of Ireland
- Saint Anthony of Padua
- House of Cards (a novel)
- Borne of the Wind (essays)
- Lough Derg
- Twenty Tales of Irish Saints
- More Tales of Irish Saints
- Jean-Baptiste Debrabant
- Patrick Sarsfield (1934),
- The Trial of Oliver Plunkett (1953)
- The Irish Story (1962)
- Francis Ledwidge: A Life of the Poet (1972).
- The Complete works of Francis Ledwidge
She also wrote for several newspapers. Also many articles in the very sophisticated and internationally known The Capuchin Annual (1930 to 1977)
References
My Mother Alice Curtayne.
Dr Andrew Rynne Summer 2013.
In my mind’s eye I can see him now digging a hole, planting a tree. He is a slight man in his thirties. He is busy. The man is my father Stephen Rynne. The tree is a six foot tall blue Lebanese cedar. The time is the autumn of 1934. The occasion for his tree planting is that he has just become engaged to my mother Alice Curtayne. They are to be married the following spring.
Now, if I stand up and look out the window here, I can see with my real eyes this time, the blue cedar standing seventy feet tall and proud, swaying slightly in a gentle breeze catching the evening light. This tree is surely a triumphant and a majestic monument to an act of love.
Alice was born in Tralee beside Benner’s Hotel in 1898. Her father was John Curtayne founder and owner of Tralee Carriage Works. Her mother was Bridget O’Dwyer. Both of these good people were dead before I or my siblings were born, so sadly we never knew them. Alice was the youngest of a large family having four brothers and five sisters. Of her brothers, one Michael died tragically young while another, John immigrated to the USA. Another brother Tom became Parish Priest of Tarbert, and another Richard, was killed in the Battle of The Somme Sep 15th 1916 together with 170 fellow Irishmen. In effect then this Curtayne family line fizzled out.
Initially she would have attended the local Presentation Convent School in Tralee which was beside her there on Castle Street. Tralee Coach Works must have prospered well for certainly no expense was spared when it came to my mother’s education. By way of “finishing school” she boarded at Sainte Union Secondary school for girls in London. This was and remains to this day, a Catholic boarding school for girls. Sainte Union still enjoys a reputation of high standards and excellence in education.
Following this, Alice travelled to Milan where she stayed for four years working as a secretary and perusing her educational goals. Here she became fluent in Italian but also managed to pick up a good grasp of both French and Spanish. Italy was to become her spiritual home and an influence which she carried with her all her life. Her first book was St Catherine of Siena written after this period in 1929 to much acclaim. Incredible as it may sound, I still collect a trickle of royalties today from the American sales of Catherine of Siena.
After Italy my mother spent some time in Liverpool becoming a member of the Catholic Evidence Guild for whom she became an outdoor speaker. During these years she published several books such that by the time she met my father in the early 1930’s she was an already established and successful writer on a broad range of subjects and literary genres from novel to hagiography, history and to straight biography.
My father it seems became a distant admirer of Alice’s writings and sent her a fan letter via her publisher. And that’s how they met as it were – simply if a little audaciously.
So, the Blue Cedar was planted outside of Downings House and Alice Curtayne started her life as Mrs Stephen Rynne in 1935. My father had lived a bachelor’s existence here for the previous ten years. It showed of course. He used to store and turn the oats inside the house on the drawing room floor. A practical man was Stephen.
Life in Downings House can’t have been easy then for a woman who would have been used to at least some ‘frugal comforts’ as de Valera might have it. A ‘cosy homesteads’ would hardly describe Downings House. No heating, no electricity, no phones, rudimentary toilet facilities. The manufacture of hot water was a major event undertaken only once a week down in the bowels of the house in the Old Kitchen as we call it. A pony and trap and bicycles together with CIE were their means of transport. The Robertstown bus to Dublin passed the gate then as it does to this day.
And yet, Stephen Rynne and Alice Curtayne endured it all well enough for them to have four children of which I was the youngest. People were hardy in those days. All four of us were born upstairs in this house as home births, the norm of that day if you had the space for it.
But as if the blue cedar planted in her honour was not enough, my mother was to have yet another surprise. Sometime in early February 1935 when she looked out from her bedroom window upstairs, written in large white letters on the lawn below her was the word ALICE.. Stephen it appears, ever the romantic, had the previous autumn purchased a few pounds of snowdrop bulbs, dug shallow trenches in the lawn spelling ALICE and dropped the bulbs in. And every spring thereafter, indeed well into my adult life, ALICE would emerge, bright and sparkling and triumphant from the winter’s glooming. A statement, if ever there was one, of love pure and simple. When it came to this kind of thing, Stephen set the bar very high indeed.
The writing was to go on unabated of course. It was my mother who encouraged my father to write his first book Green Fields published in 1938. This is a humorously written account of the goings on here on the farm over a twelve month period. It starts with an account of the thrashing and moved along from there over the next twelve months. Every pig and calf, draft horse and jennet came up for mention as did the workmen and their conversations. The cows and dogs all have names and play cameo roles through the text.
Green Fields was a big success for it’s time and launched Stephen’s career as a writer and broadcaster. Whether it would have ever seen the light of day without Alice Curtayne’s help and prompting is a mute question. In truth though, it is so well written that finding a publisher should never have been difficult.
Stephen and Alice Rynne wrote in the same room sitting opposite each other at a partner’s desk, each hammering away at their Remington typewriters, each surrounded by encyclopaedias and reference books, erasers and copying paper. He with cigarette in cigarette holder, long gray curving ash dangling precariously over the works of the typewriter; she demure and thoughtful. The noise coming from this room was strange to my childish ears. Two typewriters clattering away at each other with himself occasionally reading out loud from something he had just written to see how it sounded.
And thus the years went by. Things were getting tough now with four children in various boarding schools. This was the time of “The Vanishing Irish” the fifties and as ever, deep recession and hardship. I am not sure what prompted the idea but it was a brilliant one. Alice Curtayne was to go on a lecture tour of the United States. Catholic Girl’s Colleges were to be her target audience and the subject – saints in general and Irish saints in particular. Hard to believe it now of course but this niche market was an easy sell at the time. She quickly filled her busy schedule with gigs right across America.
She went down a treat, made plenty of friends and not a little money. So successful was my mother at this lecturing about saints business that she made three trips in all to the United States during the fifties. Of course they were tough enough for a woman of her age and at a time when it took twelve hours to fly to New York. I have an amusing account about her trying to get some sleep on a hammock in the aeroplane crossing the Atlantic She was doing alright but was greatly discommoded by a gentleman below her smoking his pipe! But she endured and in many ways saved the family from real hardship.
Out of her American connections came the idea for her last biography, that of Francis Ledwidge, the pastoral poet from Slane Co. Meath. Here she could at last throw herself into researching and writing about a real person and get away from the ethereal intangible world of hagiography. My mother is often accredited with having put Francis Ledwidge’s name up there where it belongs among the great Irish poets. That as it may this simple man was a beautiful if tragic figure enjoying the patronage of Lord Dunsany and befriending the likes of Tomas McDonagh and Joseph Plunkett signatories to The Proclamation and martyrs to the cause of Irish freedom.
Jilted in love and frustrated by politics Ledwidge made the fatal decision to enlist with the British Army and fight in the First World War. However others might have seen it, Ledwidge saw this as a patriotic act to fight with England to save Ireland. Struck by a stray shell behind the battle lines in Ypres on the 31st of July 1917 he was killed instantly. Another waste of a life, only this time that of an Irish poet with enormous potential.
Given her propensity for writing about saintly things, in is hardly surprising that our home was visited by, what seemed to me to be anyway, an endless stream of clerics and writers often gathered around the lunch table. Sherry would be served beforehand and coffee afterwards and that was it. There was never any wine on the table and spirits were for medicinal purposes only. Mary Lavin, Padraic Colum, Eilish Dillon, Archbishop John Wright from Boston were regulars together with a host of Dominicans and other priests to do with Muintir na Tire including its founder Cannon John Hayes.
Alice Curtayne, for all her scholarly and erudite writings was not without her sense of the ridiculous. One abiding memory I have, is of her sitting in front on a crackling black and white television and chortling away at the antics of Lucile Ball. Here’s Lucy was one of her favourite never to be missed TV programs. That memory of her and another glance at our graceful blue Lebanese cedar out side here, is as good a place as any to end this short account of an interesting and fulfilled life.
Note: I am grateful to The Clane Historical Society who’s suggestion it was that I write this piece.
Dr Andrew Rynne, Downings House, Prosperous, Co. Kildare.