Author: BROOKE, Charlotte
Biography:
BROOKE, Charlotte (c. 1740-93: ODNB)
Born at Rantavan House in County Cavan, Ireland, she and her brother Arthur were the only two surviving children of Henry Brooke (q.v.) and his wife Catherine Meares. She was educated by her father and excelled at learning languages. She was stimulated to learn Irish by hearing it spoken in Cavan and began to collect manuscripts in Irish. The family alternated living in London and in Ireland but eventually settled permanently in Ireland. After her mother died in 1773, Brooke cared for her father until his death in 1783 when they were living at Longfield House, near the Rantavan estate. Through various misfortunes—including the death of her brother, a captain in the EIC—Brooke's financial resources were severely depleted and she relied on her writing to earn a living. The antiquary Joseph Cooper Walker was an old family friend and he published three of Brooke’s translations from Carolan (qq.v.) in his Historical Memoirs of the Irish Bards (1786); the most prominent of these was “Carolan’s Monody on the Death of Mary Mac Guire.” Walker did not identify the “young lady” who supplied the translations but Brooke gave her name to her own Reliques of Ancient Irish Poetry (1789). In including the original Irish texts with the translations, Brooke distinguished her work from the Scottish Ossianic texts of James Macpherson while the title pointedly recalled Thomas Percy’s (qq.v.) Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765). Walker and others from the Royal Irish Academy encouraged her in preparing the book which remains an important text for Irish literature. It includes an impressive subscription list. Brooke died of fever on 29 Mar. 1793 while living with friends near Longford, Ireland. Her other publications include an educational children’s book, The School for Christians (1791, published by subscription); an edition of her father’s poetical works (1792); and a one-volume novel, Emma; or, The Foundling of the Wood (1803). (ODNB 11 Oct. 2023; DIB 11 Oct. 2023; Robert Welch, A History of Verse Translation from the Irish, 1789-1897 [1988]; A. C. Seymour, “A Memoir,” in Charlotte Brooke, Reliques of Ancient Irish Poetry [1816])