Mary Kusack

Sister Mary Francis Kusack, (May 6, 1829, or 1832, according to her autobiography - Leamington, Warwickshire, 1899), the "Nun of Kenmare" (born Margaret Anne Kusack) was a Roman Catholic convert, nun and controversialist, an Irish patriot and prolific author, most famous for lives of Irish saints and the Illustrated History of Ireland (1868), the earnings of which supported her convent. After she left the nunnery she supported herself writing and lecturing.

She was born in Dublin to a well-to-do Protestant family and sent to Exeter, Devon, to be privately educated when her parents separated. Motivated, it is said, by the sudden death of a fiancé, she first joined a convent of Puseyite Anglican nuns, but being disappointed not to be sent to the Crimea she converted to Roman Catholicism and became a Catholic nun in the Order of St. Clare, and was sent with a small group of nuns to Kenmare to establish a convent of Poor Clares, 1861. Later she wrote Honehurst Rectory (1872), ridiculing Dr. Pusey and the other founders of the Puseyite order. In 1878 appeared The Trias Thaumaturga; or, Three Wonder-Working Saints of Ireland telling the lives of saints Patrick, Columba and Brigit.

She managed though still in the nunnery to keep up a whirlwind of publishing energy while surrounding herself with controversy of every kind. She fought for her own personal rights and for Irish patriots, but made no demands for women’s rights in general, was opposed to co-education and thought degrees were wasted on women. She disliked the leveling of classes in education, according to her recent biographer.

She wrote 35 books, including many popular pious and sentimental texts on private devotions (A Nun’s Advice to her Girls), poems, Irish history and biography, founding Kenmare Publications, through which 200,000 volumes of her works were issued in under ten years. She kept two fulltime secretaries occupied for correspondence, wrote letters on Irish causes in the Irish, American, and Canadian press. In the famine year of 1871, she raised and distributed £15,000 in a Famine Relief Fund. She publicly railed against Lord Lansdowne and his agent. She was always an outspoken Irish patriot (The Patriot’s History of Ireland, 1869), though she later denied being associated with the Ladies' Land League. In 1872 she issued a life of Daniel O'Connell, The liberator: His Life and Times, Political, Social, and Religious.

Mary Kusack's melodramatic and pious novels include Ned Rusheen, or, Who Fired the First Shot? (1871); and Tim O’Halloran’s Choice (1877). Her actions provoked the hostility of clergy; sought support from Pope Leo XIII, and received permission to establish Sisters of Peace in Jersey City, New Jersey, U.S.. She issued Advice to Irish Girls in America (1872). Later, after leaving the convent, she began to establish shelters and vocational schools for female emigrants to the U.S..

In 1872 things started to go difficultly for Sister Mary Cusack: the entire edition of her life of St. Patrick burned in a fire at the publisher's. She was accused of plagiarism.

At the time of a sensational supposed apparition at Knock, she produced the pamphlet The Apparition at Knock; with the depositions of the witness[es] examined by the Ecclesiastical Commission appointed by His Grace the Archbishop of Tuam and the conversion of a young Protestant lady by a vision of the Blessed Virgin(1880). She issued Cloister Songs and Hymns for Children (1881), wrote verse, issued lives of St. Patrick, Columba and Brigid as Trias Taumaturga: The Wonder-working Saints of Ireland (1878)

In November 1881 she effectively fled the nunnery, and then in 1888 she reconverted to the Anglican communion after an altercation with her bishop and soon issued The Nun of Kenmare: An Autobiography (1889). Afterwards she wrote and lectured as tirelessly as ever, denouncing Catholicism: The Black Pope: History of the Jesuits, What Rome Teaches (1892); Revolution and War, the secret conspiracy of the Jesuits in Great Britain (published posthumously, 1910) and the like.

She died at Leamington, in the Methodist faith.

External link

• Biography and bibliography (http://www.pgil-eirdata.org/html/pgil_datasets/authors/c/Cusack,Mary/life.htm)