Boston Writer Mary Louise 'Minnie' Gilmore (1862-1932) Popular Poet and Novelist

Born in Boston on June 29, 1862, Mary Louise Gilmore was the daughter of famous bandleader Patrick S. Gilmore of Galway and his wife Ellen J. O’Neill of Lowell.  Minnie, as she was call throughout her life,  and her mother traveled extensively when the Gilmore Band was touring the United States and Europe between 1870 and 1892, and as a result she was inspired by the world at an early age. 

In 1881, when still a teenager, she began publishing her poetry in The Boston Pilot, and was praised by editor John Boyle O'Reilly and others for her writing.  She also appeared in the Boston Evening Transcript, the Catholic World and other publications.

Gilmore wrote two books of fiction and two volumes of poetry that were well-reviewed and popular in their time.  The books included: Pipes from Prairie Land and Other Places (1886), A Son of Esau (1892), The Woman Who Stood Between (1892), and Songs from the Wings (1897). 

Speaking about her first book,  Pipes from Prairie Land and Other Places,  she is quoted as saying in the Biographical Sketches of the Poets of Ireland, "A Boston girl by birth, a Gothamite by adoption, a cosmopolitan by virtue of our Bohemian, strolling life, it may seem strange that my first work should. be distinctly western....The country, which I have loved ' from my youth up,' the primitive social atmosphere here, and above all the life on horseback which I led, took my heart by storm, and I have been restive under civilization since."

The Pilot reprinted a poetry review in the New York-based Critic Magazine that harshly complained about her book, Prairie Land, before noting, "Here is a young poet, with the right element of daring in her, with the distinct germs, also, of popularity, who, with utter watchfulness, keen self-criticism, and the cultivation of the priceless knowing-of-when-to-stop facility, can be a beast to the future of literature. Godspeed to all such beginners. It is in the interest of civilization to kill off the others." 

An October 1892 review of her novel, A Son of Esau, Book Chat Magazine called it "a strong novel, a story true to life and masculine in its bold treatment of the master passions. It is hard to believe that this story is the work of a young woman at the threshold of life without experience of its actualities."

Image Courtesy of New York Public Library

Minnie was with her mother Ellen were in St. Louis when her father died suddenly in September 1892, throwing the family and also Gilmore's Band into turmoil. The two women struggled financially, and were forced to sell Gilmore's prized library of 18,000 items for a few hundred dollars in order to pay the bills.  Wrote the Pilot in 1902, " Mrs. Gilmore and her daughter, Mary Gilmore; having lost their New York estate, are  living in the Roxbury district, Boston, slenderly maintained by the literary work of the latter."  Ellen died in 1917. 

In 1907, Minnie married John P. Carter, whose parents were from Ireland, and they lived on the Upper East Side in Manhattan until her death on April 8, 1932.  Minnie is buried in the Gilmore family plot in Woodside, Queens, alongside her parents and her husband, who died in 1948.

The John J.Burns Library at Boston College has materials relating Minnie Gilmore as part of the Michael Cummings Collection of P.S.Gilmore.

Read about other Irish women of Boston and Massachusetts at irishboston.blogspot.com/

Research + Text, Michael Quinlin