A collection of personal and literary material created and preserved by A.J. 'Con'
Leventhal, Ethna MacCarthy,
and Marian Leigh. Ethna MacCarthy (1903-1959) entered Trinity College in 1922 and
won a Foundation
Scholarship. She graduated in 1926 and embarked on an academic career in European
literature. She
entered medical school in the late 1930s and graduated as a medical doctor in 1946.
Specialising in
paediatrics, she worked in the Royal City of Dublin Hospital until 1954. She married
lecturer, essayist and
critic, Con Leventhal, in 1956. She remained a close friend of Samuel Beckett
throughout her life and inspired
much of his writing. She was an accomplished poet and her poems were edited and
published in 2018 by
Gerald Dawe and Eoin O'Brien.
Marian Leigh was the widow of the prolific composer Walter Leigh who had been killed in
action in Libyia in
1942, just before his 37th birthday, leaving Marian, a widow with three children, who had
been sent to Canada
to escape the London Blitz. Marian became a documentary film executive whose work
for the National Film
Board of Canada. In 1965 she went to live with Leventhal in Montparnasse, remaining
with him for fourteen
years until his death. [Trinity College Dublin]
Significant elelments are the literary notebooks of Leventhal and MacCarthy; MacCarthy's case it consists of a notebook of her poetry. Professor Eoin O'Brien's work on Leventhal's bibliography, and his transcriptions of MacCarthy's poetry are also present. There is correspondence with and about Leventhal, printed books, magazines incuding To-morrow and the Klaxon as well as a full archive relating to the Leventhal Scholarship, of which Professor O'Brien was a founder.
The information listed from this repository has been extracted from
lists available in the archives. The lists were compiled by staff of Trinity College, Dublin Library and we are
grateful for their assistance. Due to time constraints not all items in this
repository were examined individually.
We are grateful to Felicity O'Mahony for
providing information on items and collections added since
1999.