The Fall of the House of Wilde by Emer O'Sullivan Page A

century later, Duffy remembered being stunned at Jane’s self-assurance and charm.
    [Jane’s] virile and sonorous songs broke on the public ear like the plash in later times of a great wave of thought in one of Swinburne’s metres . . . I was greatly struck by the first contribution, and requested Mr John Fanshawe Ellis to call at the Nation office. Mr Ellis pleaded that there were difficulties that rendered this course impractical, and invited me to visit him in Lesson Street. I did so immediately, not without a secret suspicion of the transformation I was about to witness.
    A smiling parlour maid, when I inquired for Mr Ellis, showed me into a drawing room, where I found only Mr George Smith, publisher to the University. ‘What,’ I cried; ‘my loyal friend, are you the new volcano of sedition?’ Mr Smith only answered by vanishing into a back drawing-room and returning with a tall girl on his arm, whose stately carriage and figure, flashing brown eyes and features cast in a heroic mould, seemed fit for the genius of poetry, or the spirit of revolution. He presented me to Miss Jane Francesca Elgee, in lieu of Mr John Fanshawe Ellis. Miss Elgee . . . had probably heard nothing of Irish nationality among her ordinary associates, but as the strong and generous are apt to do, had worked out convictions for herself. 10
    They soon struck up a friendship. Jane looked up to Duffy, who was eight years older. She described him to Hilson as ‘the most cultivated mind I know of in Dublin’. 11 Book-sharing strengthened their bond, and discussions of Carlyle’s thoughts peppered their correspondence. Duffy had accompanied Carlyle on a walking tour of Ireland, and lent Jane Carlyle’s biography of Cromwell, but the book failed to impress her. ‘Not even Carlyle can make the soulless iconoclast interesting,’ wrote Jane. ‘It is the only work of Carlyle’s I have met with in which my heart does not go along with his words.’ 12 Yet Jane was determined to finish what she had begun and requested the next two volumes. Carlyle’s belief that dilettantism was almost a mortal sin and that the supreme justification of a man’s life was honest work, solidly performed, spoke to Jane in her early years. Most frequently on Carlyle’s lips was a quote from Goethe on the seriousness of life, ‘
Ernst ist das Leben.
’ 13 And one surmises that Jane echoed Carlyle’s counsel when she wrote in one of her essays: ‘Be earnest, earnest, earnest: mad, if thou wilt; Do what thou dost as if the stake were heaven, And it thy last deed, ere the judgement-day.’ 14 Oscar would come to satirise the Victorian watchword in his play,
The Importance of Being Earnest.
    By the time Jane met Duffy, he had already led an eventful life. He had been imprisoned in 1843–4 alongside Daniel O’Connell on charges of sedition. Then he lost his close friend and political collaborator, Thomas Davis, who died on 16 September 1845, aged thirty-one. Davis and Duffy were both politically engaged in lobbying for repeal of the union of Britain and Ireland. With the death of Davis, the Repeal movement, as it was known, lost his conciliatory skills and fractured. Other factors contributed. In June 1846, Sir Robert Peel’s Tory government fell, and the Liberals under Lord John Russell came to power. O’Connell tried to persuade the Repeal movement to support the Liberals. But on 15 June 1846, nationalist Thomas F. Meagher denounced O’Connell’s move, suspecting the Repeal cause was being sacrificed to the Whig government in return for favours in the form of placements. O’Connell accused his opponents – most prominent among whom were William Smith O’Brien, Meagher and Duffy – of being secret enemies of the Catholic Church, and coined the term ‘Young Irelanders’ to signify his distance from them.
    Through Duffy