This biography is republished from The Dictionary of Irish Biography and was written by Frances Clarke. Shared by permission in line with Creative Commons ‘Attribution’ (CC BY) licencing.
Born: 24 April 1876, Ireland
Died: 26 May 1964
Country most active: Ireland
Also known as: NA
Day, Susanne Rouvier (1876–1964), writer and suffragist, was born 24 April 1876 at her parents’ residence in Sidney Place, Cork city, one of four daughters (among eight children) of Robert Day (1836–1914), a prominent Cork businessman and noted antiquarian, and Rebecca Day (née Scott). Her father served for many years as president of both the Cork Historical and Archaeological Society and the Cork Literary and Scientific Society. She came to prominence locally through her work as co-founder (with Edith Somerville) and secretary of the non-militant Munster Women’s Franchise League, and from 1911 as one of Cork’s first female poor-law guardians. A member of the Cork branch of the Irishwomen’s Suffrage Federation, she was a guest speaker at the launch (January 1913) of the Galway branch of the Connaught Women’s Suffrage Federation. Much of her writing from this period was directly related to her political work. In 1912 she published her pro-suffrage pamphlet Women in the new Ireland on behalf of the MWFL, and in September 1913 published an account of her MWFL tour of Kerry in the Irish Citizen. An active advocate of poor-law reform, she applied her observations as a guardian in her two articles ‘The crime called outdoor relief’ and ‘The workhouse child’, both of which appeared in the Irish Review in 1912. She later outraged her colleagues with the publication of The amazing philanthropist: being extracts from the letters of Lester Martin (1916), a semi-fictionalised account of her own triumphs and frustrations on the poor-law board.
Day juggled these commitments with a career as a dramatist. Her literary collaborations with fellow Cork suffragist Geraldine Cummins resulted in several plays, including ‘Way of the world’, produced in Cork in 1914, and ‘Broken faith’ (1913) and ‘Fox and geese’ (1917), both performed at the Abbey Theatre. Among her individual efforts were ‘Out of deep shadow’, staged by the Independent Theatre Company at the Gaiety Theatre, Dublin, in 1912, and ‘Toilers’, which was produced by the Irish Women’s Reform League in 1914. She left Ireland for France in 1916, and worked as a relief agent and nurse at the front. Drawing on these experiences she wrote Round about Bar-le-Duc (1918), a series of reflections on her work before and after the battle of Verdun. Returning to Cork, she resided at the family home of Myrtle Hill House, which she inherited on her mother’s death in 1914, but by the early 1930s she was again living in France. She continued to write, producing a travelogue, Where the mistral blows (1933), and more plays, among them ‘The dark horse’ and ‘Sixes and sevens’, which were staged at the Gaiety Theatre, Manchester. During the second world war she lived in Chelsea, London, and worked for the London Fire Service. She maintained her friendship with Cummins, who also lived in west London. She died, unmarried, in London 26 May 1964.