Stella G. Mew (1942–2022) was an Irish educator, headmistress, and CEO of the Yeats Society.

Life

Stella Mew was the daughter of Ronald George Gillman Mew (1905–1996), an army officer, and Maureen Carmine Palmer (1903–1978), and with her brother Clive Ernest (1936–2013) she grew up at Shirley, Chapelizod, near the Phoenix Park in Dublin. She graduated from

Trinity College Dublin Trinity College Dublin (), officially titled The College of the Holy and Undivided Trinity of Queen Elizabeth near Dublin, and legally incorporated as Trinity College, the University of Dublin (TCD), is the sole constituent college of the Unive ...

in 1966.

Career

Stella Mew first taught at Alexandra College and Park House School in Dublin, before moving to Heathfield School in Berkshire and then becoming Head of the English Department at Clarendon School in Wales. In 1972 she was appointed as headmistress of Hillcourt in Glenageary. Anne Yeats, painter, costume and stage designer, and the daughter of WB Yeats and Georgie Hyde-Lees, had been a pupil there. The following year Mew became Principal of the newly-formed

Rathdown School Rathdown School is an independent day and boarding school in Glenageary, Dublin, Ireland operating under the management of a charitable trust and with a Protestant but inclusive ethos. For most of its history an all-girls school, it became co-ed ...

. She was Principal for the next thirty years, retiring in 2002. After retirement she worked with Taylor University, Indiana, on the development of an Irish literature strand within an Anglo-Irish Studies programme. In 2005 she was invited to become CEO of the Yeats Society in County Sligo, which has run an annual Yeats Summer School for scholars since 1960. She spoke about her early love of Yeats, her discovery of his writing, her regular attendance at lectures given by Yeats scholar and Yeats Society Director Dr TR Henn at Trinity, and her first visit to the summer school, in an episode of the RTE Radio 1 show '

Sunday Miscellany ''Sunday Miscellany'' is an English-language Irish radio programme featuring new Irish writing of poetry and (mostly non-fiction) prose, broadcast on Sunday mornings on RTÉ Radio 1 since 1968. The programme does not have hosts, but contributio ...

' in 2021. Stella Mew died in October 2022. Her funeral took place in St Paul's Church in Glenageary, and her funeral cortege made a last lap of the grounds of Rathdown School.

Life

Career

References

Further reading