This biography is republished from The Dictionary of Irish Biography and was written by Bridget Hourican and Patrick M Geoghegan. Shared by permission in line with Creative Commons ‘Attribution’ (CC BY) licencing.
Born: 5 November 1776, Ireland
Died: 4 September 1865
Country most active: United Kingdom
Also known as: Adelaide O’Keefe
Adelaide O’Keeffe (1776–1865), poet and novelist, was born 5 November 1776 at Eustace St., Dublin. For the first few years of life Adelaide was brought up by a nurse in a cabin in Wicklow, where (she said) her father visited frequently but her mother seldom. With the break-up of her parents’ marriage she was denied access to her mother and endured a troubled childhood. Her father sent his children to school in England in 1782, but shipped them to France when he heard his wife had secretly visited them. After education in a convent until 1788, Adelaide acted as amanuensis to her father, by then nearly blind but a highly popular dramatist. Her own first publication was a novel, Llewellin (written 1795, published 1799), which posed as the life story of Piers Gaveston’s son told to Chaucer. In 1798 her father retired, leaving money short, and that year she wrote Patriarchal times or the land of Canaan, which expanded the story of Genesis. It went unpublished until 1811, but then ran to a sixth edition in 1842. Renown had come with the group of thirty-four poems which she contributed to Ann and Jane Taylor’s hugely popular anthology, Original poems for infant minds (1804) which ran to fifty editions and was translated. These improving, moral but charming verses for children were her best known works. She wrote further volumes of poems for children until 1849, of which the best are National characters exhibited in 40 geographical places (1818), where she profiled different races in an individuated, uncondescending way. She drew on her life for her work; her epistolary novel Dudley (1819), written after her only brother’s sudden death in 1803, treats of bereavement while The broken sword, or, a soldier’s honour (1854) is about the effect of parents’ estrangement on children.
She lived with her father, first in London and then in Southampton, where he died in 1833. After unsuccessful attempts to sell his unpublished dramatic works, she published a collection of his poems together with a short essay in A father’s legacy to his daughter (1834). He had always spoken of taking her back to Ireland, but never did, and after his death, she continued to live in England, working sometimes as a governess. In 1830 she estimated her entire literary earnings at £243 and in 1840 wrote to the Royal Literary Fund, calling her royal pension of £50 a year a wretched pittance. She was living in 3 Spring Place Hill in Southampton in April 1848. She died, unmarried, in 1865.