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Mary Catherine Gunning Colum (néeMaguire; 13 June 1884 – 22 October 1957)^[1] was anIrishliterary critic and author, who also co-founded a literary journal.

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Mary Catherine Gunning Maguire was born inCollooney,County Sligo, the daughter of Charles Maguire and Catherine (Gunning) Maguire. Her mother died in 1895, leaving her to be reared by her grandmother, also named Catherine, inBallisodare, County Sligo. She attended boarding school at St Louis' Convent,Monaghan.

Educated atRoyal University, Trinity she was founder of the Twilight Literary Society which led her to meetW. B. Yeats. She regularly attended theAbbey Theatre and was a frequent visitor amongst the salons, readings and debates there.^[2]After graduation in 1909, she taught withLouise Gavan Duffy atSt Ita's (companion school toPatrick Pearse'sSt Enda's School). She was active withThomas MacDonagh and others in nationalist and cultural causes. She co-foundedThe Irish Review (1911–14) with David Houston, Thomas MacDonagh, et al. and she and her husband, Padraic Colum, edited the magazine for some months of its four-year career.^[3] She was encouraged by Yeats to specialise in French literary criticism and to translatePaul Claudel.

She marriedPadraic Colum in July 1912, and they moved toNew York in 1914, living occasionally inLondon andParis. In middle age she was encouraged to return to writing, and became established as a literary generalist in American journals, includingPoetry,Scribner's,The Nation,The New Republic,New York Times Review of Books, andThe Tribune.

She associated withJames Joyce in Paris, and discouraged him from duping enquirers about the origins of the interior monologue in the example of Edouard Dujardin. She accepted Joyce's very ill daughter Lucia for a week in their Paris flat at the height of her 'hebephrenic' attack, while herself preparing for an operation in May 1932. She served as the literary editor ofThe Forum magazine from 1933 to 1941, commenced teaching comparative literature with Padraic atColumbia University in 1941.

She rebuttedOliver St. John Gogarty's intemperate remarks about Joyce in theSaturday Review of Literature in 1941.

A work of reminiscence "Our Friend James Joyce (1959)", written by herself and her husband, each writing various chapters, and assembled posthumously by Padraic Colum, sensitively recalls the writer; her letters are held in Scribner's Archive,Princeton University Library, while a collection of her papers is held atSUNY.

She was the author of several books, including the autobiographicalLife and the Dream, andFrom These Roots, a collection of her criticism.

• From These Roots: The Ideas that have Made Modern Literature (1937)
• Life and the Dream (1947)
• Our Friend James Joyce (1958, with Padraic Colum), memoir

• Twentieth Century Authors: A Biographical Dictionary of Modern Literature, edited byStanley J. Kunitz and Howard Haycraft, New York, The H. W. Wilson Company, 1942.
• Modern Irish Writers: A Bio-Critical Sourcebook, edited by Alexander G. Gonzalez, Greenwood Press, 1997.

• Biography and bibliography
• Padraic and Mary Colum papers, University of Pennsylvania Libraries.

• 1884 births
• 1957 deaths
• Irish emigrants to the United States
• Irish literary critics
• Irish women literary critics
• People from Collooney
• 20th-century Irish women writers
• Cumann na mBan members
• Members of the American Academy of Arts and Letters
• Writers from County Sligo

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