‘A period piece, a has-been, totally unknown to this generation’: Rediscovering WM Letts

With the surname Letts, it’s not surprising that diaries, letters and memoir form a major part of the literary estate of WM Letts. What is surprising is that the life story and works of this poet, war poet, dramatist, novelist, essayist and children’s writer have been almost forgotten, despite the recent interest in neglected female authors.
Winifred Mabel Letts (1882-1972) was the granddaughter of Thomas Letts of Letts Diaries, and of Alexander James Ferrier of Ferrier Pollock & Co, a wholesale textile and haberdashery company whose headquarters were at Powerscourt Town House, off Grafton Street. Her father was Rev Ernest Letts, rector of Newton Heath in Manchester, who also used to officiate as summer chaplain at Holy Trinity Church on the Herberts’ Muckross Estate in Kerry. Her mother was Mary Isabel Ferrier, of Knockmaroon, just outside the gates of the Phoenix Park. It was to Knockmaroon – “to Paradise” – that the family came on holidays each year, to escape from their “smoke-blackened and rather grim” Lancashire parish.
At the age of 16, Letts moved from a boarding school in the English midlands to Alexandra College in Dublin, where she studied English language and literature, French language and literature, history, geography and drawing. Following the death of her father in 1904, the family moved from Newton Heath to Blackrock, Co Dublin. The open spaces of Ireland and the open nature of Irish people seem to have released her creative spirit and, for the next 60 years, newspapers, periodicals, publishers and broadcasters regularly featured Letts’s writings – poems, short stories, essays, children’s books, plays, reviews and, in the case of The Irish Times, her letters to the editor.
Letts’s first visit to the Abbey Theatre – “a daring move” as the Abbey was regarded suspiciously by her own unionist Protestant circle – was to see Synge’s Riders to the Sea in January 1907. It inspired her to write and submit a play of her own, The Eyes of the Blind, which was accepted and first performed on Easter Monday, along with Yeats’ Deirdre and Lady Gregory’s Spreading the News and The Rising of the Moon. In October 1909, her play, The Challenge, was performed, and thus Letts, as well as being only the second female playwright to have a play performed in the Abbey, is one of the few women – to date – to have had more than one play performed there. Other plays and sketches were broadcast on radio and performed by amateur groups, and a three-act documentary play, Hamilton and Jones, was staged in the Gate Theatre in July 1941.
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Letts said, when interviewed in 1969 by Maeve Binchy for The Irish Times’s Women First series, that she never heard anything “memorable or musical” in drawingroom conversation and that all her ideas came “from the back door”, from listening to the talk of people “who came to sell things or to deliver vegetables”. A conversation with a blackberry seller from Glencullen led to the poem, Thim that Thravels on their Feet, which was published in the Spectator in 1910. Letts was then asked to write a cycle of poems which CV Stanford could set to music for Harry Plunket Greene to sing. Many of her best-known poems, including A Soft Day, Tim, An Irish Terrier, and The Bold Unbiddable Child, were published in her first collection of poetry, Songs from Leinster (1913). The two Stanford cycles, A Fire of Turf and A Sheaf of Songs from Leinster, were taken from this collection, and were performed as recently as March 2024 in the National Concert Hall as part of the Stanford Centenary Series. A second and third collection of lyrical poetry followed in 1926 and 1947.
Letts’s work during the first World War as a nursing voluntary aid detachment in Manchester, followed by her training in Baggot Street Hospital as a masseuse (nowadays called a physiotherapist), resulted in her groundbreaking war poetry, published prior to the collections of Sassoon, Owen and Ledwidge. Her early war poems celebrated the young men going off to war, even though they leave their heartbroken families behind. But as the war progressed, Letts exposed the physical trauma, and the barely acknowledged problems of mental trauma, in poems such as To a Soldier in Hospital and What Reward? Her empathy with, and sympathy for, the young soldier who “could not face the German guns” in her poem, The Deserter, makes this one of the most moving of all war poems. The collections, Hallow-e’en and Poems of the War and The Spires of Oxford and Other Poems, were published in 1916 and 1917.
As well as writing poetry and drama, essays and short stories, Letts wrote six children’s books (five of which were serialised and broadcast on radio), three books on religious themes, a memoir (Knockmaroon) and seven novels directed at an audience of young women experiencing the freedom brought about by education and employment opportunities. Her verses were used by Elizabeth C Yeats in her Cuala Press prints and cards. A copy of the Cuala Press print St Brigid, with verse by Letts, and illustrated by her stepdaughter, Kathleen Verschoyle, now hangs in Government Buildings.
Letts continued her professional work as a masseuse up to the time of her marriage in 1926 to William HF Verschoyle, a widower 23 years older than her, who had lost two of his three sons in the first World War. Letts initially found it difficult to adapt to living in town, at 19 Fitzwilliam Square, but she loved her time on the Verschoyle farmlands in Kilberry, Co Kildare. She relished the company of her step-grandson, her great-nieces, her many godchildren, and the children of those who worked for them. Life was busy with her involvement in the Women Writers’ Club, PEN, Wild Flower Society, and many charities, including the Dublin Auxiliary of the Royal Society for the Protection of Animals (DSPCA), to whom she donated royalties and poems, when it was in financial difficulties.
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After the death of her husband, Letts moved to Kent in 1947 to live with her sisters. She returned permanently to Ireland in 1953, and bought the charming Beech Cottage on Ballinclea Road, Killiney. Fifty years after her death in 1972, President Michael D Higgins attended a ceremony in Rathcoole Church of Ireland marking the addition of her name to the Verschoyle headstone.
In a 1957 interview in The Irish Times, Letts described herself as “a period piece, a has-been, totally unknown to this generation”. Two generations later, Letts is, at last, being recognised and remembered – as a groundbreaking poet, an innovative dramatist, an engaging novelist and a talented children’s author.
Sing in the Quiet Places of my Heart, a biography of Letts by Bairbre O’Hogan, is published by South Dublin Libraries.