Emily Weddall made many friends through the Gaelic League and the cultural circles that were associated with the movement. One such person was Ella Young. Ella was no stranger to Achill as she spent time there in the early 1900’s, learning the folk and fairy lore of the Island. Her and Emily’s paths may have crossed then for the first time. Later she would attend Scoil Acla classes, where the two women would have definitely met. Over the years they would have moved in the same circles and would have had many friends in common such as the Pearse family, George Moore, George (AE) Russell and the Trench sisters Cessca and Margot.
Ella Young was born in Co. Antrim in 1865. Sometime in early childhood her family moved to the Bog of Allen, a area that left a deep impression on her, in her autobiography; Flowering Dusk: Things Remembered Accurately and Inaccurately, she recalled: ” what did I carry away from that countryside of horizons? I sense of spacious skies of great embattled clouds, of fiery sunsets and rose-red dawns”. Later on her family relocated to Rathmines, Dublin. She graduated from the Royal University of Ireland (UCD), originally on Earlsfort Terrace in history and law. It was was there that she first took an interest in Irish mythology and folklore.
Sources
Young, Ella, and Stephen Griffin. Flowering Dusk: Things Remembered Accurately and Inaccurately. New York, Toronto: Longmans, Green and Co., 1945.
Mayo News June 5th 1915
http://d.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/creator/ella-young