1. Jane Francesca Agnes Wilde, Lady Wilde was an Irish poet who wrote under the pen name Speranza and supporter of the nationalist movement.
22 Facts About Jane Wilde
1. 2.
Lady Wilde had a special interest in Irish folktales, which she helped to gather and was the mother of Oscar Wilde and Willie Wilde.
3.
Jane Wilde's mother came from a prosperous Protestant family in Dublin and was considered a great beauty.
4.
Jane Wilde was the youngest of four children of the couple, her older siblings being Emily, John, and Frances.
5.
Jane Wilde claimed that her great-grandfather was an Italian surnamed Algiati which was said to be a derived from Alighieri thus inferring a relationship with the famous poet.
6.
Jane Wilde's father died at Bangalore, India when she was just three years old leaving her mother to raise her and her siblings.
7.
Jane Wilde's education was undertaken by a succession of governesses and tutors.
8.
Jane Wilde is said to have mastered ten languages by the age of 18 under the instruction of Richard Waddy Elgee, her paternal uncle.
9.
Jane Wilde became a lawyer and a judge in Louisiana.
10.
Jane Wilde's brother-in-law being an English officer caused a strain between the sisters on account of Jane Wilde's nationalism.
11.
The son, who was raised by an uncle of Jane Wilde, later became an assistant to his father and the Jane Wilde children considered him a cousin.
12.
Jane Wilde lived with her older son in poverty, supplementing their meagre income by writing for fashionable magazines and producing books based on the research of her late husband into Irish folklore.
13.
Jane Wilde wrote several books including 'Ancient legends, mystic charms, and superstitions of Ireland'.
14.
Jane Wilde's poems are said to have influenced her son Oscar's own work.
15.
In January 1896 Lady Jane Wilde contracted bronchitis and, dying, asked for permission to see Oscar, who was imprisoned in Reading Gaol.
16.
Jane Wilde was buried anonymously in common ground without a headstone.
17.
Lady Jane Wilde was the niece of Charles Maturin and wrote for the Young Ireland movement of the 1840s, publishing poems in The Nation under the pseudonym of Speranza.
18.
Jane Wilde's works included pro-Irish independence and anti-British writing; she was sometimes known as "Speranza of the Nation".
19.
Jane Wilde was an early advocate of women's rights, and campaigned for better education for women.
20.
Jane Wilde invited the suffragist Millicent Fawcett to her home to speak on female liberty.
21.
Jane Wilde praised the passing of the Married Women's Property Act of 1882, which prevented a woman from having to enter marriage 'as a bond slave, disenfranchised of all rights over her fortune'.
22.
In 1864 Sir William and Lady Jane Wilde were at the centre of a sensational Dublin court case regarding a young woman called Mary Travers, the daughter of a colleague of Sir William's and a long-time patient.