"Boycott!": Louise Imogen Guiney and the American Protective Association

Historical Journal of Massachusetts, Summer 1999 by Fanning, Patricia

Auburndale is a town populated with retired missionaries and bigots of small intellectual calibre.'

Thus writes Louise Imogen Guiney, Irish-American poet and essayist, in an attempt to explain the predicament she faced as Postmistress in Auburndale, Massachusetts, a section of Newton, in 1895. Seen as a minor literary figure today, Guiney was well known in Boston during the 1890s. The incident which inspired the above quotation is little known in Boston Irish history but one which demonstrates in a very dramatic way how ordinary people are influenced by propaganda and prejudice and it puts a human face to the clashes of ideology, religion, and culture in Boston at the end of the l9th century.

Fortunately for historians, the chronology of events can be closely traced through Guiney's Selected Letters, edited by her niece Grace Guiney; the more than 800 letters to Fred Holland Day, now part of the Louise Imogen Guiney Collection at the Library of Congress; and newspaper clippings found in the Louise Imogen Guiney Collection at Holy Cross College.

Louise Guiney was born in Roxbury in 1861 to Janet Doyle Guiney and Patrick Robert Guiney, an immigrant from County Tipperary. When the Civil War broke out, Patrick Guiney enlisted as a private in the Massachusetts Volunteers, fought with distinction in over 30 battles, was severely wounded at the Wilderness and was mustered out a General. As such, he became one of the most famous Irishmen in Boston, beloved by the Irish and respected by the Yankees for his service and patriotism. He never regained his health, however, but managed to stay alive primarily through determination and the care of his wife and daughter, until 1877 when he died suddenly at the age of forty-two.

Louise, the only child of the Guineys to survive infancy, was educated at Notre Dame Convent in Boston, the Everett Grammar School, and the Sacred Heart Convent School in Providence. Thoroughly Irish and Roman Catholic, Louise managed to walk the tightrope between Boston's Irish literary coterie, which included John Boyle O'Reilly, James Jeffrey Roche, and Katherine Conway, and the established Yankee literary circle led by Oliver Wendell Holmes and Charles Eliot Norton.

On one hand, O'Reilly, as the editor of the Boston Pilot, published Guiney's first poems in 1880 and, in 1884, she dedicated her first volume of poetry, Songs at the Start, to O'Reilly. On the other, she received much encouragement and support from Holmes, to whom she dedicated her first published collection of essays, Goose-Quill Papers, in 1885. Then still only 24 years old, Guiney was a rising star in literary circles and seemed destined to bridge the gap and help heal the animosity between the Irish immigrant community and the existing Yankee culture in Boston.

Guiney's writing reflects the pressure she encountered from the cultural and literary traditions surrounding her. First, in the mainstream literary debate between Realism and Romance (Realists believing it was time to bring real life and sorrow into literature and the Romantics believing that literature should be morally and spiritually uplifting), Guiney's educational background pulled her toward the Romantics. This tendency was reinforced by her association with Holmes and the influence of Holmes, Longfellow, and Whittier, all clearly Romantic poets.

Second, early in 1890, Guiney had traveled to Ireland where she met several of the Irish Literary Revivalists, including William Butler Yeats, Katherine Tynan, and Dora Sigerson. They too appealed to Guiney's romantic side, as did Boston Irish Romantics O'Reilly and Conway of the Pilot.

Guiney's adherence to the Romantic notion of both Boston's "Good Gray Poets", coupled with her belief in Ireland's "Celt," the melancholy, spiritually sensitive, fatalistic, but heroic loser created in large part by Yeats and Tynan, allowed her to be both Irish and Romantic in her poems, essays, and fiction. It further allowed her to avoid addressing the often unpleasant world in which she was forced to live.2

The death of her father had left Louise and her mother in a precarious financial situation. For her entire life, Louise took on various occupations, often to the detriment of her own literary work and health, to support herself and her mother. Still, she maintained buoyant high spirits and a love of mischief and adventure, even in adversity. A December, 1892, letter to her close friend and confidante, Fred Holland Day, demonstrates both her vulnerability and her resiliency: "My pocket was picked yesterday on Berkeley St.... I saw the thief, and he had every reason to see me, for I chased him hard, and very nearly clutched him...." Guiney goes on to explain that when the thief, "an undersized rough in a derby hat," saw her still close on his heels, he signaled to his fellow felons. Immediately four others, dressed exactly alike, came running to his rescue, "crossing on each other and recrossing in the cleverest way, and disappeared in a flash." She admitted that she "was no match for highwaymen of genius on ground they knew and I didn't."3