Teresa Deevy

1894-1963 [fam. ‘Tessa’; occas. err. Deevey]; b. Waterford; youngest of 13 children of a successful draper at Kilkenny, himself the son of farmers and a nationalist, moving later to Waterford, and living at first at 3 Eldon Tce., 1876, and later at Passage Rd. (d. 1897); who died when she was three; her mother was a Feehan, one uncle being Lord Mayor and the other a Land League priest; ed. Ursuline Convent School and effected by religious training; contrib. ‘Should Women have Equal Social and Political Rights?’ to school journal; suffered from Mènier’s disease from late teens, leading to total deafness before she left college; matriculated and entered UCD, 1913, Arts and teacher training; transferred to UCC and completed Arts there; lived in Waterloo Rd., Dublin, with her sister Nell (d.1954); wrote Abbey play Reapers (30 March 1930; dir Lennox Robinson), with national theme, eliciting effusive thanks from A. J. Leventhal; other Abbey plays incl. Temporal Powers (1932), praised highly in letter from Frank O’Connor; The King of Spain’s Daughter (29 April 1935), successfully revived in the 1970s; Katie Roche (16 March 1936) - published in Famous Plays for 1935-36 (1936) - quickly followed by Light Falling (25 Oct. 1936); The Wild Goose (9 Nov. 1936), centred on Martin Shea and set in the aftermath of the battle of the Boyne; spoke out against the Censorship Board and particularly the case of Eric Cross’s Tailor and Anstey; Wife to James Whelan rejected by Ernest Blythe at the Abbey, and also by the Gate, 1937; wrote exclusively for radio after 1936, producing Going Beyond Alma’s Glory, and Within A Marble City; her plays The King of Spain’s Daughter and The Enthusiast produced by Denis Johnston on BBC NI (1938); elected Irish Academy of Letters, 1954. NCBE DIB DIW DIL OCIL

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Works

Three Plays (London: Macmillan 1939), contains Katie Roche, Wild Goose, and King of Spain’s Daughter; also King of Spain’s Daughter and Other One Act Plays by Teresa Deevy (Dublin: New Frontiers Press 1947), contains King of Spain’s Daughter; In search of Valour [otherwise A Disciple); and Strange Birth [20 works in all.]; also

‘The Enthusiast’, One Act Play Magazine, 1 (1938); ‘Going Beyond Alma’s Glory’, in Irish Writing, 17 (December 1951), pp.21-32.