A mystical Irish Fortean.
Ella Young was born the day after Christmas, 1867—making her older than Fort himself—in Ireland. (She's 148 tomorrow.) Raised mostly in Dublin as a protestant, Young belonged to a relatively prosperous middle class family, eventually receiving a degree from Trinity College. She is a fairly well-known figure among scholars of Irish history and literature, but has been bad served by biographers. There are two books on her, Rose Murphy’s 2008 Ella Young: Irish Mystic and Rebel and Dorothea McDowell’s 2015 Ella Young and Her World: Celtic Mythology, The Irish Revival and The Californian Avant-Garde. The first is essentially an expanded magazine article, repetitive and refusing to engage with Young intimately; the other is a massive dissertation that reprints tons of her letters, documents her movements precisely, but, while based on the author’s presumed intuitive connection with Young, is equally antiseptic. It’s also poorly formatted,, making it hard for the reader to know wha words belong to the author, what to the material she is quoting. Still, Young is well-enough known, and her connections to the Fortean Society—and Forteanism—tenuous enough that only a brief overview of her life is necessary.
Ella Young was born the day after Christmas, 1867—making her older than Fort himself—in Ireland. (She's 148 tomorrow.) Raised mostly in Dublin as a protestant, Young belonged to a relatively prosperous middle class family, eventually receiving a degree from Trinity College. She is a fairly well-known figure among scholars of Irish history and literature, but has been bad served by biographers. There are two books on her, Rose Murphy’s 2008 Ella Young: Irish Mystic and Rebel and Dorothea McDowell’s 2015 Ella Young and Her World: Celtic Mythology, The Irish Revival and The Californian Avant-Garde. The first is essentially an expanded magazine article, repetitive and refusing to engage with Young intimately; the other is a massive dissertation that reprints tons of her letters, documents her movements precisely, but, while based on the author’s presumed intuitive connection with Young, is equally antiseptic. It’s also poorly formatted,, making it hard for the reader to know wha words belong to the author, what to the material she is quoting. Still, Young is well-enough known, and her connections to the Fortean Society—and Forteanism—tenuous enough that only a brief overview of her life is necessary.