Winifred M. Letts (10 February 1882 – 7 June 1972) was a writer who spent most of her life in Ireland.

[1][Note 1] It is widely accepted by biographers that she was born in Salford, Lancashire, England.

[2][3] She was educated first at St. Anne’s School, Abbots Bromley, Staffordshire and later Alexandra College in Dublin, Ireland.

[2][4] She spent summer childhood holidays in Knockmaroon Park, Dublin, her maternal grandparents' home.

[6][7] In 1915, during World War I, Letts joined the Volunteer Aid Detachment and was assigned to the Manchester Base Hospital in England.

[8] Trained to offer physical therapy to wounded soldiers, she served with the Almeric Paget Massage Corps in Manchester and Alnwick, Northumberland.

[9] William died in 1943[10] and Letts moved to England to live with her sisters in Faversham, Kent.

[2] In the 1950s, she returned to Ireland and purchased Beech Cottage in Killiney, County Dublin.

[12] A memorial plaque celebrating her life and work was unveiled in Rathcoole by President Michael D. Higgins on 20 June 2022.

[14] She collaborated with several artists at the Cuala Press to create illustrated broadsides of her poems.

[15] Letts is remembered today as a poet of the First World War; however, her first publications were lyric poetry exploring Irish folk themes popularised by the Celtic Revival.

An early poem, 'The Sense of Faery', was published in 1904 in the English literary magazine Occasional Papers,[16] with further poetry appearing in the Westminster Gazette[17] and the Manchester City News (1906).

[19] Two lines from the poem are inscribed on the Soldiers Memorial Gate at Brown University, dedicated in 1921: 'They gave their merry youth away / For country and for God'.

In his 1922 Anthology of Irish Verse, Padraic Colum included 'Synge’s Grave' rather than her war poems.

[21] As contemporary literary critics point out, poetry that privileged men’s experience of combat and that forged new directions in modernism was preferred over works that described the experiences of women during the war, particularly those on the Home Front.

[22] Stacy Gillis points to a new interest in women's experience that emerged in the 1980s and 1990s, when several critical studies of women’s war poetry were published, as well as the 1981 anthology Scars Upon My Heart, which included several poems by Letts.

[24] 'Letts is at her best when she tackles the casualties largely left out of the official narrative', Jim Haughey writes.

She saw John Millington Synge’s Riders to the Sea, with Sara Allgood and William Fay.

[28] A second one-act play, The Challenge, the story of a love triangle and a duel, premiered at the Abbey Theatre 14 September 1909.

[30][31] Her only three-act play, Hamilton and Jones, was produced by the Gate Theatre, Dublin in 1941.

[31] Between 1848 and 1952, Letts published a number of essays about the Abbey Theatre in English and Irish magazines.

[27] Letts’s early literary success came from novels for girls, such as Bridget of All Work (1909) and The Quest of the Blue Rose (1910).

[32] Letts's story 'The Company of Saints and of Angels' was published by The Irish Review under the editorship of Thomas MacDonagh in January 1912.

[31] Knockmaroon (1933) is a series of essays and poems about Ireland that opens with Letts’s reminiscences about her summers with grandparents on the outskirts of Phoenix Park.

She includes a number of character sketches of Irish people of all classes and often refers to the events of the decade after the Anglo-Irish Treaty as 'the Troublesome Times'.

The book is primarily pastoral in imagery, ranging descriptively over impressions of landscape and architecture.

[33] Knockmaroon gathered together a series of essays that previously appeared in publications such as Cornhill, Spectator, Manchester Guardian, Irish Review, Irish Statesman, Month, and Country Life.

Full text available at International Music Score Library Project (IMSLP) [3] Charles Villiers Stanford.

(Contains “Grandeur”, “Thief of the World”, “A Soft Day”, “Little Peter Morrissey”, “The Bold Unbiddable Child”, “Irish Skies”.)

Full text available at International Music Score Library Project (IMSLP) [4] Charles Villiers Stanford.