Others believe this date seems unlikely given that the marriage of her parents, John Balfour and a daughter of Dr Samuel Moore of Derry, took place in January 1778.
After the death of her father, Balfour and her sisters had to support themselves by teaching, initially in Newtown Limavady, then in Belfast.
She celebrated the sacrifice in the United Irish cause of Henry Joy McCracken at the gallows in 1798 in her poems "The Seventeenth of July", the date of his execution when "the despot triumphs and the patriot weeps," and "The sword of my Harry": "Some hearts with freedom's tide still fondly swell,/Some lips yet dare the hero's worth to tell...".
[4] She contributed four translations of Irish poems into English to A General Collection of the Ancient Music of Ireland (1809) by the McCracken family protégé Edward Bunting.
A note in a volume of poems by John McKinley published in 1819 suggests she had died,[1] and that year and her age at death as 39 has been elsewhere quoted.