A Cyclopaedia of Female Biography/Tighe, Mary
TIGHE, MARY,
Was the daughter of the Rev. William Blachford, county of Wicklow, Ireland. Mary Blachford was born in Dublin, in 1774; and in 1793, when but nineteen years old, she married her cousin, Henry Tighe, of Woodstock, M. P. for Kilkenny, in the Irish parliament, and author of a "County History of Kilkenny." The family of Mrs, Tighe were consumptive, and she inherited the delicacy of organization which betokens a predisposition to this fatal disease. From early womanhood she suffered from depression of mind and langour of frame, which probably gave that "tone of melancholy music" to her celebrated poem, "which seemed the regretful expression of the consciousness of a not far-off death." Well she might feel sad when this thought was pressing on her heart; for she was most happily married, beloved and cherished by her husband, and surrounded with all the luxuries of life.
She died in 1810, aged thirty-five, after six years of protracted suffering. Her husband, though he survived her some years, never married again. She left no children; but the scenes of her bridal happiness, and of her lamented death, will bear the memory of her beauty, genius, and virtues, while her "Psyche," is read, and the names of those who have celebrated her merits in their songs are remembered. And she has left an enduring monument of her goodness, which gives lustre to her genius. From the profits of her poem, "Psyche," which ran through four editions during her life-time, she built an addition to the orphan asylum in Wicklow, thence called the "Psyche Ward."