Mary Tighe

Mary Tighe (née Blachford, 1772–1810) was an Irish poet, born in Dublin on 9 October 1772, the daughter of the clergyman William Blachford and the Methodist leader Theodosia Tighe. At twenty-one she married her first cousin Henry Tighe, a member of the Irish Parliament; she later lived in London, where she knew Thomas Moore, and spent her last years in failing health, dying of tuberculosis at Woodstock, County Kilkenny, on 24 March 1810.

Her Psyche, or the Legend of Love, a retelling of the tale of Cupid and Psyche from Apuleius in six cantos of Spenserian stanzas, was privately printed in 1805. It was published in 1811, the year after her death, together with a gathering of her shorter poems, sonnets and songs, and won her wide admiration, Keats among her readers. The texts here are from Psyche, with Other Poems (London, 1811).