Remembering Sister Mary Delaney

I met Sister Mary Delaney when I was a first-year English major at Gwynedd-Mercy College. Until I landed in her classroom, I’d spent 12 years trying to escape school, tuning in only when a teacher, usually by virtue of comedic showmanship, could startle me into participating.

Sister Mary showed me the difference between a good teacher and a great teacher. It was not her encyclopedic knowledge of literature that transformed me from fugitive to seeker; from reluctant term paper-producer to writer. The first words I ever heard her utter were, “You’re not going to learn any Shakespeare in four years. No poetry. No Faulkner. No Flaubert. No Kurt Vonnegut.”

“Okay, tiny nun, you’ve got my attention,” I thought, pondering her from my roost at the back of the classroom.

She said, “I’m here to show you how to learn – how to study literature, how to appreciate words, how to think critically, how to write convincingly – and then the rest is up to you. If the English Department can get that across in four years, assuming that you’re still here in four years, we’ve done our jobs.”

Then she asked us to tell her about ourselves; what we liked to read, where we’d been and where we thought we might want to go. She talked about her beloved biological and spiritual families and about her proud Irish roots. I found myself revealing that my great-grandfather had hastily left Ireland under suspicious circumstances, changed the spelling of his surname and smuggled himself into North America. I told her how I’d devoted a significant portion of my childhood to eavesdropping on my grandparents and their cronies, trying (and failing miserably) to unearth more details on the man about whose incarnation as an American I knew so much, but whose past was shrouded in mystery.

A week later, Sister Mary stopped me in the hallway and handed me a battered old book bearing the title, The Portable James Joyce. “Oh, ick,” I said. “Oh no,” she answered. “You’ll see.” I reported that I’d once spent months trying to decode Finnegans Wake. “I don’t get it,” I argued. “His writing is like…jazz. There’s no melody. There’s no structure or rhythm. It just goes spiraling all over the place.”

“Read Ulysses first,” she said, opening the book to a section marked with a paper clip. Then she added, “You know, until the 1930s, Ulysses was banned in the United States. It had to be smuggled in, like your great-grandfather.” I was stunned that, out of all the pupils she’d see in her classroom or office in any given week, she’d remember a random freshman, much less connect a face with a confession about shady family trees.

“You come from rule breakers, and Joyce broke every rule of modern fiction,” Sister Mary said. “Read Ulysses first, and approach it as if you’re eavesdropping on your grandparents. If you do that, you’ll understand what made Joyce a great writer. Keep the book. We’ll talk about Finnegans Wake after you’ve had your epiphany.”

And I did, and we did, and oh, how good Sister Mary was at her job. She led by example. By taking an active interest in what made her students unique, by habitually observing and honoring what made each of us curious, and by teaching from her heart as much as she did from the prescribed curriculum, Sister Mary Delaney showed us how to teach ourselves. More importantly, she made us believe in our ability to learn.

Thirty-seven years later, I still have the book. Despite my best efforts to safeguard it, my puppy removed it from a book case last summer and ate about two inches of its fragile binding. I think Sister Mary would probably just laugh and say, “Standard poodles have good literary tastes.”

Will I cherish the memory of this brilliant, witty woman for the rest of my life? Here is where our friend James Joyce says it much better than I can, “Yes I said yes I will yes.”

Kathryn Reid

GMC Class of 1975