Wilson, Florence Mary (née Addy ) (1874–1946), poet, was born in August 1874 in Island Mill, Lisburn, Co. Antrim, the second child and eldest daughter among three daughters and two sons of Robert Charles Addy, son of a primitive methodist preacher from Loughgall, Co. Armagh, and Margaret Addy (née Laughlin), from Banbridge, Co. Down. The family lived in Island House, Lisburn, where her father was mill manager of the Island Spinning Co. After attending school in Bow St., Lisburn, for two years, she was a day pupil in the friends' school, Lisburn (1884–8), then boarded at Miss McKillop's, a girls' school in Derry city, for four years. She married (4 January 1898) Frederick Hugh Graham Wilson in Shore St. presbyterian church, Donaghadee; they had five daughters and four sons. A solicitor with offices in Belfast and Bangor, Co. Down, he died in 1915. In 1918 Florence Wilson's address was ‘An Grianán', Groomsport Rd, Bangor; she eventually moved to 101 Groomsport Rd, her home until 1945.
Encouraged in her writing by Alice Milligan (qv), her friend and neighbour, Wilson published poems, essays, and stories in numerous Irish and British periodicals, including the Irish Homestead, Northern Whig, T. P.'s Weekly, Ulster Guardian, and Westminster Gazette. Her writings express a love of flora and the landscape, intimate knowledge of local history, folk belief, and custom, and familiarity with Irish legend and antiquity. She wrote a series of articles on country life in Co. Down for the Spectator (London) and the Manchester Guardian (1910s). Often she wrote in dialect, derived in part from the speech of maids in her childhood home. She published a short poetry collection, The coming of the earls and other verse (1918), in which the prevailing theme of national resurgence, expressed with historic and mythic resonances, is leavened with vignettes of local colour. The dedicatory poem is addressed to ‘Niall’, who seems to have perished overseas with the British army. The collection includes her best known poem, ‘The man from God-knows-where’, a dialect ballad evoking the organising role of Thomas Russell (qv) for the United Irishmen in Co. Down, and his hanging outside Downpatrick gaol in 1803. A perennial favourite for quotation and public recitation throughout Ireland and abroad, the poem was set to music by Scottish folk group Five Hand Reel on their record album ‘A bunch of fives’ (1979), and was the model for the loyalist ballad ‘The man in the soft black hat’ (1967), which recounts a sectarian murder in 1966 in Malvern St., Belfast, and the subsequent trial of Augustus ‘Gusty’ Spence (b. 1933).
Wilson's poetry has been anthologised in Padric Gregory (ed.), Modern Anglo-Irish verse (1914), and Joe McPartland (ed.), The Ulster reciter (1984); an essay, ‘A memoir of Alice Milligan’, appears in Sophia Hillen King and Sean McMahon (ed.), Hope and history: eyewitness accounts of the twentieth century (1996), 16–18. Erudite across a breadth of topics, possessed of a varied range of accomplishments, Wilson was an adept amateur painter, pianist, storyteller, and conversationalist. Interested in archaeology, she discovered a bronze brooch at Ballycastle, and donated her collection of flints to the National Museum of Ireland. Her nationalist sympathies notwithstanding, extracts from her poem ‘The Portavoe poachers’ were used in first-world-war recruiting posters. Three of her sons saw military service in the second world war, and the fourth worked for the admiralty.
She died suddenly at her residence on 7 November 1946, and is buried in Newtownards Rd cemetery, Bangor. Her writings (sole date 1928), comprising prose, poetry, drama, and much autobiographical material (with typescripts by Anne Colman), are in the Institute of Irish Studies, QUB. A copy of a photographic portrait, the original of which is privately held, is in the Ulster Museum's history department, and was published in Hill and Pollock, 105.