SKRINE, AGNES HIGGINSON
Publication
28 February 2023Agnes Shakespeare “Nesta” Higginson Skrine/Moira O’Neill
Born Cushendun, County Antrim, Ireland, 1864. Died Ballyrankin, Co Wexford, Ireland, 1955.
Author: Michele Holmgren
Agnes Higginson Skrine, who published as “Moira O’Neill,” has commemorative landmarks on opposite ends of the globe. A plaque on Cushendun Old Church acknowledges her poetry, which celebrated the Glens of Antrim. In 2011, a small creek in the Porcupine Hills in southwestern Alberta was named in honour of the Skrine family, early settlers in the region.
Skrine was born in Mauritus but grew up near Cushendun. She considered herself a “Glenswoman” with a lifelong attachment to the area, its culture, and distinct form of Hiberno-English. After marrying Somerset-born Walter Skrine in Cushendun in 1895, she left her beloved glens with her new husband, who had leased 17,000 acres 24 miles from High River in what was then called the North West Territories.
In Canadian imperial rhetoric and in English imagination, an upper-class female settler was seen as both a moral mainstay of the new western settlements and an object of pity. A refined Anglo-Irish woman torn from her beloved Ireland and genteel comforts could expect only homesickness, sacrifice, and privation in her new life. In reality, Walter Skrine brought Agnes to a fine new two-story house built with lumber hauled by horse from Calgary. She was happy to demolish the stereotype of the hapless “English lady on a ranche” in a Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine article published in 1898. Already a successful author before she left Ireland, she likely channelled some of her homesickness into poetic celebrations of the Glens “made more intensely precious by exile,” in the view of John Masefield, who admired her poems. Moreover, Skrine believed there was “a good deal of sympathy between Ireland and the North West,” and poems celebrating the sublime prairie landscapes shared space with her Antrim poems in her two published collections. For at least “one small Irishwoman happily situated,” as she described herself in “A Lady’s Life on a Ranche,” life was not an “unenviable existence in the barehanded struggle” for “existence,” but a source of freedoms unavailable to women of her class in Ireland and England.
Noting that Anglo Irish society was “more given to neglect superfluities…follow after sport, and love horses” than its English counterpart, Skrine argued that her upbringing had been “good training for the North – West.” Genteel outdoor leisure activities could be taken up in the new territories, with coyotes standing in for grouse. Freed from the stress of household demands in the form of social obligations, servants, endless silverware, and the complexities of newfangled stoves, Skrine was content with one male cook and a few hours of light housework. It was a small price to pay, she conceded, for “all the joys of liberty.”
Skrine revelled in the solitude that allowed her to enjoy the outdoors, gather flowers, read, write poetry, and think without “that daily division and subdivision of time which the making and breaking and rearranging of engagements entails on the members of society.” Nor did winter faze her. Like her compatriot Nicholas Flood Davin and other promoters of immigration, she extolled the prairie winter’s “mysterious effects of colour” along with the “light sparkle and exhilaration in the air that acts on the spirits like a charm.” She captured the seasonal changes and the spirit of the landscape in her prose an.d poetry. While titled Songs of the Glens of Antrim, her 1901 collection portrayed the North West where “the long land-breezes rise and pass/ And sigh in the rustling prairie grass. While she imagined a longed-for return to Ireland, she claimed, “you’ll lave your heart behind you in the West.”
While the Skrines welcomed farmers into a region that had been jealously guarded by ranchers, the gradual change to a farming economy convinced the family to sell their lands to neighbors (the Bar S ranch continues to operate today) and return with their two children to Ireland in 1902. They settled first in Kildare and then in a country house near Ferns, Co. Wexford. They had three more children including Mary Nesta Skrine, who became the novelist Molly Keane, who eclipsed her mother’s own considerable fame. However, Skrine’s first poetry collection sold well on both sides of the Atlantic, and John Masefield considered her one of his favorite writers. Her Irish-themed lyrics were set to music by the Irish composers Sir Charles Villiers Stanford and Sir Hamilton Harty and recorded by many singers including Kathleen Ferrier.
A certain “house upon the prairie in the lone North West” and her childhood region continued to feed her lyric muse while she lived at Ballyrankin House in Wexford, and a second collection, More Songs from the Glens of Antrim, appeared in 1921. Perhaps aware of changing tastes and Modernist poetics, Skrine included a note saying that they were “written by a Glenswoman in the dialect of the Glens and chiefly for the pleasure of other Glens-people.” Modern upheavals affected the Skrine family in a more immediate domestic manner when their country house was nearly destroyed in an IRA arson attack the same year. (The Skrines stood to watch their house go up in flames, having declined the offer of two armchairs salvaged by the arsonists.)
The family rebuilt and remained in the area. Walter Skrine died in a hunting accident in 1930, and Agnes’s natural introversion intensified into reclusiveness in the years leading to her death at Ballyrankin house in 1955. More successful as a writer than mother, her eccentricities and maternal failings were recorded unsparingly by her novelist daughter. Her poetry nevertheless promoted a sense of pleasure and pride in the regional distinctions of the North of Ireland and of her first married home in the North West. Like many emigrant Irish writers, her transatlantic perspective shaped her portraits of both worlds. The presentation of prairie nature and society through the eyes of a newcomer rendered it new and distinct; the home landscape became equally so, made vivid and unique in the emigrant’s desire to recollect and commemorate it.