Dora Sigerson Shorter was born in Dublin, the daughter of Dr George Sigerson, the Gaelic scholar and poet, and Hester Sigerson (née Varian), herself a published novelist. Dora Sigerson and her younger sister Hester, who also became a writer, grew up in a household in which visits from writers, artists and musicians were commonplace. Dora Sigerson developed literary talent early, contributing poems to the Irish Monthly, United Ireland and the Nation. She published many volumes of poetry, including The Fairy Changeling and Other Poems (1898) and Ballads and Poems (1899), followed by a substantial Collected Poems when she was just 41 years old. She had a particular talent for narrative verse, especially for the ballad form, and many of her most memorable poems blend Irish folk tradition with the imaginative tension of narrative development and refrain, leading Douglas Hyde to pronounce her ‘the greatest storyteller in verse that Ireland has produced’. Much of her work also had a melancholy strain that combined at times with a gothic sensibility. She remained a committed nationalist, in spite of spending most of her married life in England, and, unlike Katharine Tynan—with whom she maintained a friendship— she was greatly affected by the 1916 Rising. Sixteen Dead Men, published posthumously in America and reissued as The Tricolour: Poems of the Irish Revolution (1922), contains elegies for those executed following the Rising. Other volumes published after her death in 1918 include The Sad Years (1918) and A Legend of Glendalough, and Other Ballads (1919).