Blanaid Salkeld (1880-1959) was an Irish poet, dramatist, and actor, whose well-known literary salon was attended by, among others, Patrick Kavanagh and Flann O'Brien. Her son, Cecil ffrench Salkeld was one of the leading Irish artists of the day; her granddaughter Beatrice married Brendan Behan.

Early Life

Salkeld was born in Chittagong, in what was then India but is now Pakistan, and grew up in Ireland. Salkeld's father, a doctor in the Indian Medical Service, was a friend of Rabindranath Tagore and also introduced her to the poetry of Keats when she was six. When she was in Dublin and her father in India, she regularly included her poems in letters to him. He had two volumes of these printed privately in Calcutta. She married in 1902 and spent the next six years in India with her husband, who worked in the Indian Civil Service .

Theatre

On returning to Ireland, Salkeld joined the Abbey Players as an actor and once played the lead role in George Fitzmaurice's three act play The Country Dressmaker. She started writing verse plays in the 1930s, and one of these, Scarecrow Over the Corn was staged in 1941 at the Gate Theatre with stage sets designed by Louis le Brocquy.

Poetry

Salkeld published five books of poetry, Hello, Eternity (Elkin Mathews 1933), A Dubliner (Dublin: Gayfield 1942), The Fox’s Covert (JM Dent 1935), the engine is left running (Gayfield 1937), and Experiment In Error (Aldington, Kent: Hand & Flower Press 1955). The first of these was reviewed favourably by Samuel Beckett.

Reviews

Salkeld contributed numerous book reviews to The Dublin Magazine. She reviewed a wide range of books, but focused especially on contemporary poetry (for instance, in perceptive reviews of Anna Akhmatova and Pound's Pisan Cantos). She also used her review writing to promote an interest in poetry by women, especially Irish women.

References

Print

• Autobiographical note on dustjacket of Experiment In Error.

Online

• Blanaid Salkeld at The Princess Grace Irish Library