author
Moira O'Neill
1864–1955
Best known for lyrical poems rooted in the Glens of Antrim, this Irish-born writer brought local speech, landscape, and feeling vividly onto the page. She also wrote fiction and essays, building a literary life that stretched from Ireland to western Canada and back again.
1 Audiobook
Songs of the Glens of Antrim
by Moira O'Neill
About the author
Born Agnes "Nesta" Shakespeare Higginson in Mauritius in 1864, she grew up partly in Cushendun, County Antrim, and wrote under the name Moira O'Neill. Her work is closely linked with the Antrim glens, whose voices and scenery inspired the poems that made her reputation.
Her best-known book, Songs of the Glens of Antrim, grew out of poems first published in Blackwood's Magazine and became the work most often associated with her. Reliable biographical sources also describe her as a novelist as well as a poet, and note that she spent several years in Alberta after marrying Walter Skrine in 1895 before returning to Ireland.
She is also remembered as the mother of the novelist Molly Keane. Today, Moira O'Neill is valued for the warmth and musicality of her verse, and for the way her writing preserves a strong sense of place without losing its human charm.