The short and unhappy life of Sarah Curran began in Rathfarnham, south Dublin. Sarah was born into a home dominated by her father, the most famous barrister in the country, John Philpot Curran. Since Curran was a man known for his domestic aggression, Mrs Curran, not surprisingly, was something of a doormat. Sarah, the youngest of nine and always delicate, was virtually ignored by both her parents. When she was twelve years old, her downtrodden mother summoned enough spirit to elope with a local vicar.
Sarah’s brothers all went to Trinity College. While there, young Richard Curran met a shy patriot named Robert Emmet. Robert came from a family of staunch Republicans and he joined the secret Society of United Irishmen while still in his teens. Rather than admit his membership, he dropped out of the university in 1797. Three years later, Robert first saw seventeen-year-old Sarah Curran at a ball in Rath Castle, County Wicklow, where she was making her début into Dublin society. She was slim, black-haired and pale-skinned, with enormous dark eyes and a most beautiful singing voice. Besotted at first sight, the twenty-two-year-old Robert was too shy to approach her. Shortly afterwards, he left Ireland to travel in Europe.
Back in Dublin again in 1802, Robert’s college friend, Richard, invited the young idealist home to dine and to talk with his family. After a number of such visits, Robert was deeply in love with Sarah. For her part, she felt little more than friendship for him, but friendship in her loveless young life was important and she was happy to keep the relationship going. One day, Sarah’s father, realising what Robert was up to and not approving of him as a potential son-in-law, banned him from the house. Sarah, showing some of her mother’s spirit, continued to meet Robert, in secret. Letters flew between the two – usually carried by Robert’s friend and colleague, Anne Devlin.
Months passed and Robert, confiding all his hopes and dreams to Sarah, even discussed the insurrection he was planning. The young idealist hoped to stage a rising that would forcibly take control of Dublin from the occupying English. On 23 July 1803, Robert led about eighty rebels in an attempt to storm Dublin Castle. Unfortunately, miscommunication, poor organisation and lack of popular support meant that the attempt was doomed to fail before it had even begun. The rebels broke up in disarray and the 1803 Rising was quashed in just one night. Hopelessly in love, Robert refused to save his life by absconding to the USA. He preferred instead to hang around south Dublin in the hopes of seeing Sarah. His cat-and-mouse game with the authorities came to an end on 25 August when he was betrayed and arrested by Major Henry Sirr, Dublin’s chief of police.
Two of Sarah’s (unsigned) letters were found on Robert’s person during his arrest, and while he waited for his death he tortured himself with the thought that she would somehow be dragged into the mess. He even offered to plead guilty if the court would suppress the letters. Eventually, in his fear, he did a foolish but typically chivalrous thing: he bribed a warder and gave him a letter to take to Sarah, warning her of the danger she was in. The warder duly handed this letter straight into the hands of Major Sirr, who arrived on the Currans’s doorstep in Rathfarnham shortly afterwards.
After watching while his house was ransacked for evidence of complicity, and furious at Sarah’s defiance in continuing to communicate with Robert, Sarah’s father informed her that she was ‘blotted [from his] society, or the place she once held in [his] affections’. In effect, he made it impossible for her to remain at home. As Robert was living out his final days in Kilmainham Jail, contemplating the scaffold, Sarah was on her way to Cork. She saw neither home nor Robert again.
Robert Emmet was given a traitor’s death. On the morning of 20 September 1803, he was taken to a spot outside St Catherine’s Church on Thomas Street, Dublin, where he was publicly hanged, drawn and quartered. He was twenty-five years old.
In Cork, Sarah found a refuge with her friends, the Penrose family, with whom she stayed for more than two years. She felt partly responsible for Robert’s death, and was described at this time as morose and guilt-ridden. It seems likely she suffered a nervous breakdown.
Despite the generosity of the Penroses, Sarah knew she couldn’t live on charity forever and that the only practical course open to her was marriage. Strangely enough, the man prepared to take her on was a British Army officer, Captain Henry Sturgeon. Like Robert Emmet, Sturgeon was an honourable and good man. They were married in the winter of 1805 in what must have been a love match – there could have been no career advantage in marrying a penniless outcast with connections to a dead Irish rebel. As for Sarah, she was adamant that she could not forget Robert, but she admired and respected her new husband.
Ten months after the wedding the couple sailed to Sicily and, though homesick, Sarah seemed to enjoy the only peaceful period in her life. She was treated well by ‘dear Henry’, and when, in the summer of 1807, she discovered she was pregnant, she was delighted. But Fate had not finished with Sarah Curran.
Heading back to England a month before her baby was due, the ship on which they were travelling was struck by a storm outside Gibraltar. The crew and passengers were stranded as no other vessel could attempt a rescue due to the dangerous sea and weather conditions. Sarah went into premature labour on 26 December 1807. She gave birth the following day on the rocking, freezing floor of an empty cabin with no one to help her. She then sank into a fever. On the thirteenth day she was finally able to breastfeed her weakening baby son, and the ship finally docked at Portsmouth. But by the fifteenth day her baby was dead. ‘My heart is bleeding and broken,’ Sarah wrote to Anne Penrose, ‘and I can’t pray to God, for he has forgotten me.’
Sarah lingered a few months after her baby’s death, but was unable to rally and died of consumption on 3 May 1808. She was only twenty-six. Her last request was to be buried next to her sister in the family grave at Rathfarnham, a request her father refused. She is buried instead at the family seat in Newmarket, County Cork. She has been immortalised in song as ‘the beloved of Robert Emmet’.
‘She is far from the land
Where her young hero sleeps
And lovers around her are sighing,
But coldly she turns
From their gaze, and weeps
For her heart in his grave is lying.’
from ‘She is far from the Land’, Thomas Moore