Clodagh Finn: Vivid imagination and keen intellect of Tralee-born journalist Alice Curtayne

In 1948, for example, she was described as “a distinguished figure among contemporary Irish writers… her scholarship in the matter of the early Christian period is just as great as that which was shown in her remarkable studies of such representative figures as Dante and Saint Catherine of Siena.”

By then, she had married fellow writer Stephen Rynne and was mother to four children. Unusual for the time, she continued to work and, more unusual still, travel — alone. In the 1950s and ’60s, she completed five lecture tours in America, speaking on history, Irish life and literature.

Her son Davoc Rynne recalls the long trips away, which sometimes lasted up to six weeks. “We looked forward to her return with great excitement. What wonders would she bring home to us?” Blue jeans were unheard of in the 1950s when she brought a pair back for her son.

“My school pals called me ‘cowboy’!”

“What was she like as a mother?” He poses the question himself before answering it: “She was a kind and loving mother. She was also a ‘working mother’ and so was absent a lot. She spent a lot of time up in her room writing. I can still hear the tap, tap, tap of the typewriter, a big old manual machine.

“Both my parents, Stephen and Alice, were writers and they shared the typewriter until Alice got a portable one. She was a fast typist using all her fingers while Stephen used only one finger on each hand.”

Growing up, Davoc remembers lots of interesting visitors coming to their home on the family farm in Prosperous, Co Kildare. “I remember the poet Padraic Colum, author Eilís Dillon, the author Mary Lavin, Cardinal John Wright of Philadelphia. I served him when he said Mass in our home way back then,” says Davoc.

Alice Curtayne also taught for a short period in Edinburgh and at Anna Maria College in Paxton, Massachusetts, which awarded her with an honorary doctorate in humane letters in 1959. She was well-known at home, too, and delivered a Thomas Davis lecture on Dante on Raidió Éireann.

It seems incredible that she was forgotten — by my generation, at least — in the town where she was born on November 6, 1898, to Bridget Curtayne (née O’Dwyer) and her husband John, a coach builder and founder of Tralee Carriage Works.

She attended Presentation Convent as a child and later, with her older sister Bryde, went to a convent school run by the French order La Sainte Union in Southampton.

It’s fascinating to read, in an entry of Who’s Who, that she never had any ambition to be a writer. “Whatever equipment is supposed to be necessary for such a career, I was sure I hadn’t it,” she said.

Italian job

“When I left the convent school in my native Tralee, I took a modest secretarial job. After a couple of years, I went to Milan, still in a secretarial job, now perhaps not quite so modest. I was twenty, harrowed by loneliness, with nowhere to go and nothing to do on the long summer evenings.”

Her employers told her she would be paid more if she improved her Italian, so she began to read books in that language. “With a mercenary rather than a cultural motive, I began to explore library facilities. One evening, my eye ran along a reading-room shelf where were displayed six volumes of the letters of St Catherine of Siena.”

Catherine of Siena, her first book, was published in 1929. Several others on a wide range of historical subjects followed, from books on the lives of saints, to a scholarly work on Dante and a well-reviewed biography of Irish poet Francis Ledwidge, who was killed in action in Ypres, Belgium, during World War 1.

That book was dedicated to her own brother, Richard, who died during the Battle of the Somme in 1916. His grave was never found and, for decades afterwards, Alice wrote to the War Records Office in the hope of locating him. She never did.

Alongside her books, she developed a distinguished career in journalism, as her grandson Niall Rynne outlines with pride during a talk he gave at Listowel Writers’ Week in 2021 (It’s available online). In the 1960s, she reported from Rome on the second Vatican council and wrote for several papers; The Kerryman, the Irish Press, The Irish Times, the Irish Independent and the Spectator among them.

Her beautiful speaking voice was what made a lasting impression on him, he recalls. “She spoke with regal authority,” he says. Although there was a lighter side too: “She was a bit of a joker.”

Her grand-daughter Áine Rynne remembers her quiet presence, but is sorry not to recall more as Alice died when she was five. She is delighted, however, that there is renewed interest in her life and work. “I am very proud of my grandmother. It’s been really lovely to reflect on her and all she achieved. What a trailblazer, and she was so ahead of her time.”

Though, Áine is cut from the same cloth. “I am a very independent woman myself and always went against the grain. I’m a free spirit — maybe it’s a gene thing!”

Imagine the inspiration Alice Curtayne would have given to a generation of girls if a portrait of her was hanging in her former school. As the popular phrase has it: “You have to see it, to be it”. Tennis player Billy Jean King apparently coined the expression in 2012 — so recent! — when she was making the very valid point that role models are vital.

They are, yet you don’t always have to see it to be it. All you need is at least one person cheering you on, as Alice had. A nun in her school in Southampton encouraged her to write.

(I should add a note here to say that I also got encouragement from the nuns at Presentation Tralee, and in particular from my English teachers, Mrs Sugrue, I never knew her first name, Kay Kirby and Liz O’Keeffe.)

Alice Curtayne didn’t have a role model that we know of, but she will act as one for future generations now that her extraordinary life is back on full view.

Her work is also available to a new generation; her books have been reissued by Cluny Media. I’ll leave you with what the publisher’s editor-in-chief John Emmet Clarke had to say about them: “Her books are the brilliant output of a vivid imagination, a keen intellect, and the mighty power to portray the human experience in all its mystery, and human history in all its complexity.”