Jean E.U. Nealis
Jean Elizabeth Ursula (Wilkinson) Nealis (poet) was born 25 September 1842 in Fredericton, New Brunswick to John Wilkinson (1804-1871), Civil Engineer and Engineer to the Provincial Board of Works, and Mary Rebecca Curry (ca. 1808-1874), daughter of Capt. Wm. Curry, a renowned New Brunswick Loyalist (“Wilkinson”; Johnson 7.322). Mary Curry was an artist especially skilled at wildflower illustrations. Musically talented, her daughter Jean became organist at the Christ Church Anglican Cathedral in Fredericton.
On 5 August 1864, Jean married outside her Anglican faith to Roman Catholic Hugh Nealis at St. Dunstan’s Church in Fredericton (Johnson 22.451). A New York City merchant who was originally from Ireland, Hugh later set up as a merchant/clothier in Saint John, NB. They had eight children.
Jean’s life, however, was marked by tragedy. One infant daughter, Margaret J. (1869-1870), died of dysentery (Nealis, Drift 87); another daughter, Mary Agnes, drowned at the age of nine in 1876 (Drift 88). A few years later, on 29 June 1879, eldest son Lignori Nealis died at the age of fourteen in Saint John (Johnson 47.87).
Broken and distraught, Nealis went to Boston to find work, eventually entering a convent in that city in 1884 (Corres. from Nealis to Fr. Daniel E. Hudson, 5 May 1884). Letters to Fr. Hudson further reveal that she left her husband because he was an alcoholic and was refusing to support her or her children. Under the advice of the Bishop, Nealis had moved to Boston to make a living and to earn enough money to send her boys (aged thirteen, ten, and five) to school in New York. Concerned always with her children’s education, she later left money with Acadian vicar Fr. Camille Lefebvre to educate them at St. Joseph’s School in Memramcook, NB. Jean reconciled with her husband in the summer of 1885 (Corres. to Fr. Hudson, 3 Aug. 1885).
But, again, tragedy seemed to follow them. On 18 March 1893, their youngest son, Charles Boyle, died of heart failure at the age of fifteen at St. Joseph’s College, Memramcook (Johnson 87.75). A week later, another son, Basil, died at the age of twenty of diphtheria, also at St. Joseph’s (Johnson 86.2370). Their mother, it appears, was with them at the time of their deaths.
Amidst all this tragedy, Nealis wrote; however, it was while living in Boston in 1884 that her focus as a writer fully developed. Feeling the necessity to write to earn money, she contributed articles and poems to Saint John newspapers and Catholic periodicals, including Ave Maria (Notre Dame, IN), Boston Pilot, and Messenger of the Sacred Heart (Dublin, Ireland). In 1884, she published her only collection of poetry, Drift, a book whose verses were witness to the life of tragedy she had experienced. The collection opens with a preface by Mary Anne Sadlier (1820-1903), who had authored books written for Irish Catholic immigrants to North America. Along with her husband, Mrs. Sadlier also ran a Catholic publishing house with offices in Montreal and New York. In her preface to Drift, Sadlier captured the essence of Nealis’s work, writing that “What Ossian calls the ‘joy of grief’ runs, like a deep undertone, through the poetry of Mrs. Nealis” (Drift 9).
Nealis dedicated her book of poetry to what then were her three deceased children. Sadlier comments further:
Yet nothing is more admirable than the true Christian resignation wherewith the sacrifice of those loved ones is made on the altar of the heart whose life they had been. Only the most tender piety, the most assured hope, could have drawn from out of that crushed heart the exquisite and most perfect acts of sublime resignation to the Divine will which we find so touchingly expressed in many of these poems. But the poems, although for the most part sad and pathetic, are not all of a sombre character. We here and there come upon rare glimpses of the beautiful inner life over which sorrow has too early cast a veil. We find graceful communings with nature in her calm and restful solitudes – genial outpourings of grateful affection are there, elicited by the sympathetic kindness of many friends, which has, all through, cheered the lone heart of the gentle poetess in her passage through the gloomy Vale of Shadows. (Drift 10)
One of her more memorable poems that speaks of communing with nature – a dominant Nealis theme – is “Longing-1882,” in which Nealis remembers her life in Fredericton:
I wonder if the maple leaves are turning
To a crimson sea of glory,
Far up, upon the dear old “College Hill,”
And down below the “Old Bridge,” by the Mill,
And if sweet “Maple Falls” are singing still
The same romantic story! …
O, Fredericton, I see your beauteous gardens
In my dreaming only,
And wake, with wistful longing – weak and vain;
For me to tread, your pleasant streets again
Would be to find, with a remorseful pain,
The graveyard walks less lonely! (Drift 16-17)
The last poem in Drift, written by Nealis in August 1884 at Bay Shore, Carleton, now part of the city of Saint John, resonates especially today in a world grown familiar with the fallout from pandemics and other global troubles. The following lines, full of a mix of spiritual fatigue and resigned hope, are from “Tired”:
So tired waiting, –
The end of all this useless, thankless, striving,
This long, long weariness that we call “living” –
The end of dreams that bring such sad awaking
Of disappointment, and the heart’s slow breaking,
So tired waiting,
Waiting for the end!
So tired waiting, –
Where those who loved us, all, are gone before us,
And miss our voices from the Heavenly chorus.
Before the looming shadows thicker gather,
Before we lose our way, O God, our Father,
We are so tired,
Let us go Home! (97-98)
Particularly significant in these poems is not just the world-weariness of the Pre-Raphaelite sensibility that Nealis’s verse captures, a sensibility that was de rigueur among poets at the time, but also the expression of that sensibility in a New Brunswick context. Later New Brunswick poet Francis Sherman would perfect that sensibility, bringing into the province’s literature a more modern tone and outlook. Jean Nealis’s verse stands as an important precursor to that shift.
A review in the Saint John paper, Progress, sensed that shift, saying of her work that “Mrs. Nealis’ poems are clear and human. Some of them are haunting. The fact that many of us have felt as she has felt, and that now she expresses our own feelings draws us at once close to her” (“A Sweet Singer” 6). A more personal and emotional – and less fanciful – literature was indeed emerging from her pen.
Jean Nealis’s husband Hugh died of heart disease in Saint John on 28 June 1904. Nealis soon after moved to New York to live with her daughter in Brooklyn. She died there on 12 October 1910, a largely unheralded New Brunswick poet of formidable talent and deep sensitivity.
Christine Lovelace, Summer 2023
UNB Fredericton
Bibliography of Primary Sources
Correspondence from Jean E.U. Nealis. Nealis Family Papers (ZCT). University of Notre Dame Archives, Notre Dame, Indiana. 1884-1887. Accessed 26 June 2023. https://archives.nd.edu/findaids/ead/xml/zct.xml
Nealis, Jean E.U. Drift. Saint John, NB: T. O’Brien & Co., 1884.
Bibliography of Secondary Sources
“A Sweet Singer of Canada.” Progress [Saint John, NB] 23 November 1889: 6.
“Jean Nealis (1842-1910).” Canada’s Early Women Writers. Accessed 26 June 2023. https://cwrc.ca/islandora/object/ceww%3Ae4fce064-7664-4e37-b952-9d570b116d12
Johnson, Daniel F., ed. “Daniel F. Johnson: Vol. 7, No. 322.” Daniel F. Johnson’s New Brunswick Vital Statistics. Provincial Archives of New Brunswick, Fredericton. Accessed 4 August 2023. https://archives.gnb.ca/Search/NewspaperVitalStats/Details.aspx?culture=en-CA&guid=6A0ABEBE-1C02-41CC-B48D-E86457D4D6AD
---. “Daniel F. Johnson: Vol. 22, No. 451.” Daniel F. Johnson’s New Brunswick Vital Statistics. Provincial Archives of New Brunswick, Fredericton. Accessed 4 August 2023. https://archives.gnb.ca/Search/NewspaperVitalStats/Details.aspx?culture=en-CA&guid=B4C6D67E-6C10-48F7-943F-A194E1378824
---. “Daniel F. Johnson: Vol. 86, No. 2370.” Daniel F. Johnson’s New Brunswick Vital Statistics. Provincial Archives of New Brunswick, Fredericton. Accessed 4 August 2023. https://archives.gnb.ca/Search/NewspaperVitalStats/Details.aspx?culture=en-CA&guid=A9D3A260-DEB9-48A4-BB8D-552D5199142A
---. “Daniel F. Johnson: Vol. 47, No. 87.” Daniel F. Johnson’s New Brunswick Vital Statistics. Provincial Archives of New Brunswick, Fredericton. Accessed 4 August 2023. https://archives.gnb.ca/Search/NewspaperVitalStats/Details.aspx?culture=en-CA&guid=0BB76D80-6FB0-40D9-AC62-78CA5D953188
---. “Daniel F. Johnson: Vol. 87, No. 75.” Daniel F. Johnson’s New Brunswick Vital Statistics. Provincial Archives of New Brunswick, Fredericton. Accessed 4 August 2023. https://archives.gnb.ca/Search/NewspaperVitalStats/Details.aspx?culture=en-CA&guid=711C4F76-5CCC-45C6-9715-4B4F043A86FF
“Mary Rebecca Wilkinson fonds.” MG H 197. Archives & Special Collections, University of New Brunswick Libraries. Accessed 22 Nov. 2018. https://7067.sydneyplus.com/archive/final/Portal/Default.aspx?component=bsearch&record=ec34ccac-16b1-4e53-82cd-8aa9f8016dd3
Maxwell, Lilian M.B. The River St. John and Its Poets. 2nd print., enl. ed. Sackville, NB: Tribune Press, 1947.
“Nealis, Jean E.U.” Canada's Early Women Writers. Simon Fraser University Library Digital Collections. Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC. 1980-2014. Accessed 4 August 2023. https://digital.lib.sfu.ca/ceww-920/nealis-jean-eu.
“Wilkinson, John.” County Council Marriage Records, 1789-1887. Film 15476, p. 869, cert. 1478. Provincial Archives of New Brunswick, Fredericton, NB. Accessed 4 August 2023. https://archives.gnb.ca/Search/CountyCouncilMarriageRecords/Details.aspx?culture=en-CA&Key=852E4B26-33D2-4AF2-BFE5-71997E2D7BCC