Kitty O'Shea

Katharine Parnell (née Wood; 30 January 1846 – 5 February 1921), known before her second marriage as Katharine O'Shea and popularly as Kitty O'Shea, was an English woman from a political family whose adulterous relationship with Irish nationalist Charles Stewart Parnell led to a widely publicised divorce in 1890 and his political downfall.

Background

She was born in Braintree, Essex, on 30 January 1846, the daughter of Emma Caroline Wood and Sir John Page Wood, 2nd Baronet (1796–1866), and granddaughter of Sir Matthew Wood, a former Lord Mayor of London. She had an elder brother who became Field Marshal Sir Evelyn Wood and was also the niece of both Western Wood MP (1804–1863) and Lord Hatherley, Gladstone's first Liberal Lord Chancellor.

Katharine Wood was brought up at the family home, Rivenhall Place, Rivenhall in Essex, with little formal education, but in an artistic and literary milieu.

Early married life

In 1867, Katharine married Captain William O'Shea, later a Catholic Nationalist MP for County Clare, from whom she separated around 1875.

An important figure of this period of Katharine O'Shea's life was her widowed maternal great-aunt Anna Maria Wood née Michell (1792–1889); formerly married to Benjamin Wood (died 1845), a brother of Sir Matthew Wood, 1st Baronet, she was known in the family as "Aunt Ben". Aunt Ben published verse and translations. She rented a house in Brighton for the young couple, while William O'Shea settled debts, where their first child was born. She lived at Eltham Lodge, where she employed George Meredith as a weekly companion: he read aloud for her. The arrangement dated from 1868, at which time Meredith was campaigning for his friend Frederick Maxse.