Sarah J. Swift Papers
A Quaker and philanthropist from Worcester, Mass., Sarah J. Swift was a noted supporter of Friends’ missions in Palestine and Jamaica for over half a century. The wife of D. Wheeler Swift, an innovator in the manufacture of envelopes, Swift began to support the Friends’ foreign missions by the 1890s, becoming a major benefactor of the Eli and Sibyl Jones Mission and girls’ school in Ramallah and of the small Quaker mission at Buff Bay, Jamaica.
The Swift papers contain a thick series of letters from the Society of Friends’ Eli and Sybil Jones Mission in Ramallah, Palestine, documenting their activity between 1890 and 1942, with a much smaller series of letters relating to the mission at Buff Bay, Jamaica. The missionaries’ letters — including circular letters to supporters and others addressed to Swift personally — discuss school operations and local affairs in Palestine and Jamaica. Of particular note are letters discussing the work at Ramallah around the turn of the twentieth century and several letters discussing the hardships of wartime and recovery from war.
Mary Doyle Curran was born in 1917 in Holyoke, Massachusetts. She remained there for the entirety of her adolescence, attending the local public schools for her primary and secondary education. After graduating high school, she went to Massachusetts State College (now known as the University of Massachusetts) where she received her undergraduate degree in English, becoming the first person in her family to ever do so. While at school she met George Curran, and a few years later they married. Curran then proceeded to earn her Ph.D. in English at the University of Iowa. She graduated in February 1946 and almost immediately began teaching Contemporary Literature at Wellesley College. She later spent time as an English professor at Queens College, CUNY. Toward the end of her career Curran worked at the University of Massachusetts Boston in the Irish Studies department.
Curran’s only published novel, The Parish and the Hill, was released in 1948. She began the writing process during one cold and lonely winter at the University of Iowa, and finished it only a few years later. At the time of its publication it was not widely recognized, but the novel is now regarded as an important piece of Irish American literature, and is particularly esteemed in the Holyoke area where the book is set. Curran’s novel has been praised for its straightforward telling of the constraints facing first generation Irish-Americans and their descendants. She was a firm believer in the adage “write what you know” and The Parish and the Hill very clearly reflects this belief. In the forward of the 2002 reissue, Caledonia Kearns writes, “the power of this book…lies in the author’s sense of drama and the fierceness of her nostalgia.” Curran pulls the reader in with her ability to portray everyday life as something extraordinary, though not always beautiful.
In 1981, Curran died of lung cancer; she was living in Boston at the time. Her writings, both published and unpublished, were left to her friends Anne Halley and Jules Chametzky. As a part of its “Contemporary Classics by Women” collection, the Feminist Press reissued The Parish and the Hill in 1986, and then again in 2002. The 2002 edition includes an afterward written by Anne Halley, once a student of Curran’s, but a close friend in later years. The proceeds from these publications were aimed toward funding a prize for a woman author with a disability, which was a request outlined in Curran’s will.
The papers of Mary Doyle Curran trace the author’s intellectual and artistic growth. The bulk of the collection is comprised of her unpublished works, all of which address the experience of Irish American women in the 1920s. The rest of the collection, which includes letters, school material and photographs, complete a portrait of the woman as both an academic and novelist.
Acquired from Jules Chametzky, 2005.
Processed by Rachel Purington, 2016.
)Cite as: Mary Doyle Curran (MS 435). Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries.