About Ella Young

The Ella Young Society exists to share information about events, publications, and productions about Ella Young, her life and legacy. Click the subscription below to get on the mailing list.

“Ella Young was a fantastic being.… She had an indescribable force or magic about her.”

Rosalind Sharpe Wall, UC Berkeley student in the 1930s

Few people confirmed my sense of life as a heroic adventure calling for qualities of fierce strength and noble endurance, gentleness toward the weak, and passionate reverence for beauty, in particular the beauty of the living earth—until I met Ella Young.”

Elsa Gidlow, poet, Druid Heights, Mill Valley

Born in 1867, Co. Antrim, and educated in Dublin, Young joined the Celtic Revival, a political and cultural movement opposing British colonialism (1880s-1920s). Irish political organizer “Æ” (George Russell), published her poems. In her memoir, she describes bittersweet conversations with revolutionary leader Patrick Pearse, and her bemused impressions of poet W. B. Yeats long before his Nobel prize. Her friend Maud Gonne created the illustrations for Young’s first books, stories of Irish mythology. The idealism of the Celtic Revival fueled a rebellion and independence, but an ensuing civil war killed or exiled many of Young’s friends. In 1925, she emigrated to the US. She would have been considered an old woman—fifty-eight—without husband or fortune.

The people and landscape of America revitalized her; she found new spirits in the natural beauty of California. For seven years she lectured at UC Berkeley. She was a welcomed guest in the counter-cultural gathering places of Carmel and Big Sur, the “Dunes” of San Luis Obispo County, and The Cats in Los Gatos. She is the likely inspiration behind the name “Druid Heights,” the Marin art colony. In her final home of Oceano, near the Theosophist settlement of Halcyon, she is remembered as the “Godmother of the Dunites.”

She brought from Ireland a concept, cóir, found in Irish stories, sometimes translated as “natural balance.” She taught that the land holds spirits, that you can talk to a mountain, and that humans are part of the planet, not here to dominate it. This connection of ecological consciousness to “cosmic consciousness” was Ella’s message for her time and ours. Her strikingly contemporary message is one that California needs today.

No one who met Ella Young ever forgot her. Young’s contemporaries were deeply moved by her passionate reverence for the “beauty of the living earth.” Her influence can be glimpsed in her memoir, Flowering Dusk, in its anecdotes featuring Californian artists, writers, composers, and art patrons: Ansel Adams, Mary Austin, Robinson Jeffers, Elsa Gidlow, John O’Shea, Upton Sinclair, Noel Sullivan, Albert Bender, Edward Weston, Henry Cowell, Gavin Arthur, Mabel Dodge Luhan, Georgia O’Keefe, Dorothy Brett, John Varian, Kenneth Morris, W.W. Lyman, Helen Lyman Hoyt, Sara Bard Field, and C. E. S Wood.

About ten years after her death in 1956, historian James Cain interviewed several of Young’s friends, recording first-hand memories.

Among Cain’s interviewees is photographer and environmentalist Ansel Adams. Young recognized Adams’s genius in the 1920s, and he created Young’s most famous portrait. Adams ended his autobiography with the “mantra” she gave him:

I know that I am one with beauty
And that my comrades are one
Let our souls be mountains
Let our spirits be stars
Let our hearts be worlds