Salkeld was born in Chittagong, in what was then India but is now Pakistan, and grew up in Ireland. Salkeld's father, a doctor in the Indian Medical Service, was a friend of Rabindranath Tagore and also introduced her to the poetry of Keats when she was six. When she was in Dublin and her father in India, she regularly included her poems in letters to him. He had two volumes of these printed privately in Calcutta. She married in 1902 and spent the next six years in India with her husband, who worked in the Indian Civil Service.
On returning to Ireland, Salkeld joined the Abbey Players as an actor and once played the lead role in George Fitzmaurice's three act play The Country Dressmaker. She started writing verse plays in the 1930s, and one of these, Scarecrow Over the Corn was staged in 1941 at the Gate Theatre with stage sets designed by Louis le Brocquy.
Salkeld published five books of poetry, Hello, Eternity (Elkin Mathews 1933), A Dubliner (Dublin: Gayfield 1942), The Fox’s Covert (JM Dent 1935), the engine is left running (Gayfield [1937]), and Experiment In Error (Aldington, Kent: Hand & Flower Press [1955]). The first of these was reviewed favourably by Samuel Beckett.
Salkeld contributed numerous book reviews to The Dublin Magazine. She reviewed a wide range of books, but focused especially on contemporary poetry (for instance, in perceptive reviews of Anna Akhmatova and Pound's Pisan Cantos). She also used her review writing to promote an interest in poetry by women, especially Irish women.Early Life
Theatre
Poetry
Reviews