Patrick Robert Guiney

Patrick Robert Guiney (1835-1877), a Union officer during the Civil War, had a lasting impact on his daughter. Prior to his military career, he attended the College of the Holy Cross, a Jesuit university in Worcester, Massachusetts, and practiced law. After the war, he was elected assistant district attorney for Suffolk County. Wanting Louise to have a Catholic education, he sent her to Elmhurst Academy of the Sacred Heart in Providence, Rhode Island. He died when she was 16, leaving her to become the family breadwinner

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Boston Catholic churches

Catholicism formed the core of the Guiney’s family life. In 1859, Patrick Guiney married Jeannette Margaret Doyle at the Cathedral of the Holy Cross, Boston’s first Catholic cathedral, designed by famed architect Charles Bulfinch at the turn of the century. The following year, it was demolished to permit construction of a larger edifice, consecrated in 1875. During the intervening years, the Guiney family became regular communicants at the Church of the Immaculate Conception, the Jesuit church affiliated with Boston College in the city’s Irish South End. Funeral Masses for both Patrick and Jeannette Guiney were held in the church. Louise regularly attended Mass there and at other Jesuit churches, as well the new cathedral. Her devotion to the Catholic faith came to figure largely in her writings.

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Catholic education

In 1872, the Diocese of Providence purchased a 30-acre estate surrounded by elm trees from Dr. William Grosvenor, and converted it into a Catholic school for women, Elmhurst Academy of the Sacred Heart. Sent as a boarding student by her father, Guiney wrote to him, “I often wonder if Elmhurst wasn’t the Garden of Eden once, it is so lovely.”

The Society of the Sacred Heart, a congregation founded in 1800 by St. Madeleine-Sophie Barat, ran the school as part of its mission to “reveal to the world a God who loves us” and to “educate children to be a source of transformation in their world.” Elmhurst Academy operated until 1961. Its library was then transferred to Newton College of the Sacred Heart, which merged with Boston College in 1974, providing a separate campus for its law school. Some of the books shown here are from the original Elmhurst library.

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Aware of Elmhurst’s importance to Guiney, her friend and fellow author Alice Brown gave a copy of her biographical tribute, Louise Imogen Guiney, to its library. Elmhurst held many of Guiney’s books, regarding her as a role model. Brown wrote this, and most of her books, at the Boston Athenaeum.

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Timothy Cole, a master wood engraver, created this finely detailed portrait of Guiney to serve as the frontispiece for Alice Brown’s tribute. A costly volume to produce, it was limited to 100 copies.

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Boston Public Library and the Boston Athenaeum

Dissatisfied with her job as a postmistress, Guiney took up library work instead. In 1899, she wrote to a friend, “I like my daily chore, which is on the Catalogue of our great Boston Public Library.” She developed useful skills that aided the research she conducted for her essays and biographies.

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Guiney was also able to research and write at the Boston Athenaeum, a membership library founded in 1807. Although unable to afford membership herself, she was sponsored by fellow poet Annie Adams Fields. Fields also helped Guiney by hosting her literary debut at her home, and introducing her to important Boston authors. They maintained a long friendship, with Fields including Guiney as a beneficiary in her will.

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Guiney wrote to Herbert Clarke in January 1899 about the Boston Public Library: “It is as beautiful a prison house as can be imagined and luckily for me, I like and know the women and the men with whom I am thrown into association every day.”

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Guiney’s friend Annie Adams Fields was married to James T. Fields, partner in Boston’s leading publishing firm, Ticknor and Fields. The Fields frequented the Boston Athenaeum because its resources attracted writers. During the latter part of the 19th century, the Athenaeum became particularly supportive of women writers, artists, and educators.

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