‘Both Beautiful, One a Gazelle’: A Review Essay

1When I first saw a reference to Sonja Tiernan’s life of Eva Gore-Booth, I thought that the biography must be a case of bricks without straw, as there was so little material relating to Eva, in contrast to her more prominent sister. How mistaken I was. Using the extensive material relating to the Gore-Booth family in the Northern Ireland PRO, newspapers of the time, and documentation relating to the suffragettes, Tiernan has produced a vivid picture of an independent spirit, who found personal happiness and a political programme in her relationship with another woman, Esther Roper.

2It is clear from many photographs of the sisters as young women that Eva, whom Yeats recalled as having a ‘delicate gazelle-like beauty’, was not as robust as Constance, although, like Constance, she was an excellent horsewoman. While in London in 1888, she became seriously ill with scarlet fever, then endemic in urban areas. She was very ill and the only treatment for this agonising condition before antibiotics was careful nursing. Eva recovered, but possibly remained debilitated by the illness. She is said to have suffered from respiratory illness from childhood, and the dust-jacket image of her, from an oil painting by Constance Markievicz now in the Lissadell Collection, confirms the impression. A visit to the writer George Macdonald’s villa, Casa Corragio, in Bordighera in Italy was for her health, but it also was to transform her life. Here she met Esther Roper, the great love of her life, a young political radical from a working class Irish background in Manchester. She was only two years older than Gore-Booth, but had already attended Owens College Manchester, one of the first women to do so, receiving a first class result in Latin and English Literature, while simultaneously running the family household after the premature death of her mother. This strain caused a breakdown in health which took her to Bordighera and to Eva Gore-Booth.

3Gore-Booth’s poem about their meeting, ‘The Travellers’ (not published until 1904) opens ‘Was it not strange that by that tideless sea | The jar and hurry of our lives should cease?’, which expresses what the meeting meant to her. Eva returned to Lissadell, where inspired by Esther Roper’s suffrage work, she immediately organised a local branch of the women’s suffrage campaign. This indicated her first stirrings of independence. The first meeting of the Sligo branch was held in Drumcliffe with a packed audience, mainly male objectors. Constance opened the meeting. Despite robust objections to ‘petticoat government’, Eva Gore-Booth then took the chair to applause and carefully analysed the issues. The meeting was noticed—not very sympathetically—in the Sligo Champion the local Nationalist paper. To its contributors, the Gore-Booths were simply Ascendency landowners.

4No material covering the Gore-Booth family’s reaction to Eva Gore-Booth’s decision in 1897 to move to Manchester in order to unite her life with Esther Roper seems to have survived; but Eva was of age and presumably had demonstrated her aversion to marriage. Her extraordinary youthful beauty and grand family background would have made her a very attractive catch for a young man; indeed it had already caught the fancy of the young Yeats, who moved by Eva’s sympathy on hearing his account of his love for Maud Gonne, adding that their friendship became so close that he ‘nearly said to her, as William Blake said to Catherine Boucher, “You pity me, therefore I love you”’. He reflected that he was too poor a suitor for that great house. He gave Eva a set of his three-volume Works of William Blake (1893) co-edited with Edwin Ellis, later in Alan Clodd’s collection, a lavish gift from a poor young man.

5The Gore-Booths with their interest in spiritualism were possibly more tolerant than the typical aristocratic household. They had already accepted Constance’s decision to move to London, to study at the Slade School of Art, so perhaps Eva’s move was not so shocking to them as it would have been to a more conventional aristocratic family. However, one hears the voice of Lady Bracknell: ‘You intend to live in Salford with a working-class suffragist whom you met in Bordighera?’. Constance had already left the family home, and was by now studying art in Paris, a very daring move, even for such a strong personality. She probably broke Eva’s fences for her.

6Eva must have been conscious of the risk which she was taking in moving to industrial, heavily-polluted Salford, especially given her respiratory problems. On the first of March 1900, she made a lucid will, leaving her entire estate to Esther Roper. Yet, paradoxically, a happy same sex relationship saved her from the fate of many upper class young women, death in child birth: the possibility of death in childbirth from puerperal pyrexia, even for a strong, healthy young woman, was very real. As soon as Eva settled in Manchester in a very ordinary red brick house, a great contrast to Lissadell, she began work on her first book of poems which was published by Longmans, to a modestly favourable reception, although Yeats in a letter warned her against ‘rhetoric’ (advice which she ignored).

7Then she threw her energies into suffragist activity, as well as work to improve the conditions of Manchester working women. She was genuinely popular with the young working-class women whom she met, her Irish accent must have helped in an area with many Irish immigrants. By 1901 she is described as being the Secretary of a women’s suffrage organisation. She still took her holidays in Lissadell and on one visit wrote her most popular poem ‘The Little Waves of Breffney’, which George Russell published in ‘Celtic Christmas (1903)’, a special number of the Irish Homestead. Russell also collected this poem in an anthology, New Songs (1904), which collected work by younger writers. Unseen Kings, her first play on an Irish mythological theme, was published in 1904, again by Longmans, but it was found unsuitable then for production by the Abbey Theatre, although it was later produced by her sister’s venture, the Independent Theatre Company, and by the Abbey Theatre in January 1912. Despite her physical frailty, she became a successful public speaker, arguing that lack of the franchise contributed to the low wages paid to women. She firmly rejected the violent tactics espoused by Christabel Pankhurst, her pacifism guiding her response to this issue. She wrote a severe letter to Millicent Fawcett condemning educated and upper-class women who ‘kick, shriek and kick’ and who thus alienated working-class women, who had a greater sense of dignity.

8In 1907 Constance Markievicz joined Eva at a suffrage meeting. This, paradoxically, was Constance’s first political venture, and she was attracted by its radicalism. An unwise heckler asked her if she could cook a dinner, she replied that she could do that and also drive a four in hand, the most highly skilled form of carriage driving. A photograph survives of her doing just that with Eva as her passenger. This experience of political activity with her sister seems to have spurred her to join Irish political organisations, such as Maud Gonne’s Inghinidhe na hEireann. It was now clear to Constance that political activism was fun. She had driven a coach and four white horses in support of the campaign.

9Eva continued to work to support working women whose employability was being eroded, such as barmaids. Their pressure group resulted in a Bill’s being defeated in the Commons and Eva Gore-Booth and Esther Roper wrote to the Times to thank formally those who had supported their campaign. Eva also helped a group of waitresses to form a union, which improved their working conditions. She also worked for several days at the pit brow in a mine, to establish what working conditions were for women in the mines. This was an astonishing act for a ‘delicate’ aristocrat with a history of respiratory illness. The progress towards suffrage stalled and Roper and Gore-Booth put their energies into an organisation which sought to reject sex difference called the Aethnic Union. Both were aware that moves to protect women in employment on spurious health grounds often disguised a wish to bar women from a range of occupations. The move to block women from work as barmaids had been presented as an attempt to improve their moral health and physical well-being. Those who opposed bicycle riding by women, often produced fanciful ‘medical evidence’ that such an activity would damage women’s reproductive powers. And this had a popular element, the first woman to ride a bicycle in London, was greeted with a hail of bricks and stones.

10Lauren Arrington’s life of Constance and Casimir Markievicz follows in the wake of many less serious and scholarly attempts at a life of Constance. She opens with a discussion of the delightful c1895 photograph of Constance Gore-Booth entertaining Althea Gyles in her Chelsea studio, an enchanting tableau of female liberation, exiles from Ireland, now two bad girls from the Slade. Althea Gyles was also trying to make her way as an independent book designer. In discussing Althea Gyles’s links with Yeats, however, Arrington follows numerous previous scholars into that great Bog of Cloone, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Gyles was never a member, as R. A. Gilbert’s definitive list of members makes clear.2 (This mistake has been made regularly, but Gilbert does authoritatively reproduce the details of the original documents.) Symbolism from the Rosicrucian Inner Order of the G. D. is indeed found in Gyles’s cover designs for Yeats, but their symbolic programmes came from Yeats himself. The nearest she got to the Order was her friendship with Yeats and a possible encounter with Moina Mathers, who was prepared to cast horoscopes for young women, if they thought that their lives were at a crisis. Both Gore-Booth sisters had an interest in spiritualism, shared by their entire family. Both sisters’horoscopes survive in the Gore-Booth papers in the PRO for Northern Ireland. Yeats, no mean astrologer, seems to have cast these horoscopes. Arrington sees in this activity an attempt to draw Constance into the Golden Dawn, but I think this unlikely.

11At the conclusion of her time at the Slade, Constance decided to study painting at Julian’s academy in Paris, which admitted women. Arrington quotes a very telling excerpt from Constance’s 1892 diary of a desire to have ‘something to live for, something to die for’. This might be a man or a cause. She found the man in Paris. Casimir Markievicz had come to Julian’s to study, but not alone, his wife gave birth to their son Stanislaus in Paris, 1896. Casimir, who lived on an allowance from his landed family, separated from his wife in 1898. His wife and their second child died en route to her parents in what is now the Ukraine. Stanislaus was taken over by his grandmother. When Constance met Casimir at a fancy-dress party, he was effectively a single man. A mutual friend introduced him to Constance, describing her as a ‘living Rossetti or Burne-Jones’. From that moment she told her brother they were ‘great pals and comrades ever since’, which suggests a cause rather than infatuation. By now Constance was known as ‘teuf-teuf’ by fellow students, which translates as ‘party-party’.

12Her father was dead and her brother became the custodian of Gore-Booth family honour; Josslyn Gore-Booth tried to discover whether or not Markievicz really was a Count. She pleaded with her brother to the effect that Casimir was ‘not like a frenchman’ and really more Irish than otherwise. She told Josslyn that Casimir was not a Polish nationalist, so ran no risks from Russia, the ruler of ‘Congress Poland’. After interminable wrangling from both families and countries they married three times, at the Russian legation in London, at Marylebone Registry Office and at St Mary’s Church, Marylebone with Eva in attendance. Much attention was given to the massive pearl necklace which Constance wore, as well as a diamond pendant, a gift from Lady Gore-Booth. ‘Obey’ was omitted from the marriage service. Their only daughter, Maeve was born at Lissadell in 1901 and later lived there with her grandmother and uncle and aunt.

13Constance’s assertion of Casimir’s likeness to Irish people was proved on his introduction to Irish society, participating happily in upper-class society as well as the avant-garde. He and Constance contributed to George Russell’s exhibition of ‘Young Irish Artists’ (Casimir becoming ‘Irish’ by marriage). In Dublin he also moved away from a Russian identification to a Polish identity. Constance had also exploited this change of heart: on a visit to his family estate at Zywotowka, she painted a melancholy study of a young peasant being conscripted into the Russian army, a work which had powerful resonance for Irish Nationalists, who could identify with the parents’ evident despair. The couple’s love of the theatrical expanded from attendance at costume balls at Dublin Castle to the formation of an ‘Independent Theatrical Company’, in obvious rivalry to the Abbey Theatre. This company used the same premises as did the secessionist ‘Theatre of Ireland’, formed by former Abbey players. This splitting of theatrical energies in a very small capital caused much ill-feeling. Yeats was understandably hostile.

14Although Casimir increasingly moved in Nationalist circles, as did Constance, he was not interested in staging patriotic plays. Constance collaborated in an unusual peasant drama with Seamus O’Kelly, Lustre, set in the West of Ireland and essentially an attack on materialism and Industrialisation.

15By 1908 Constance had joined the Irish Nationist women’s organisation Inghinidhe na hEireann, arrived for her first meeting straight from a ball in a blue velvet gown with diamonds in her hair, but her sincerity and her knowledge of Suffrage campaigns in Manchester impressed her fellow members, who could then overlook the diamonds. After all, one of the founders, Maud Gonne had campaigned in the West during a local famine wearing a sable coat, worth many thousands.

16The process of Constance’s radicalisation had probably begun while helping her sister’s suffrage campaign in Manchester. Irish Nationalists in Sinn Fein had little time for such campaigns, the implication being that women would (perhaps) get a vote when Ireland was liberated. As usual women were sent to the back of the queue, a common phenomenon in radical movements, which tend towards both overt and covert antifeminism. Constance was prepared to accommodate herself to this position, although by 1909 her position shifted once more to an insistence that National Sovereignty and female emancipation went hand in hand.

17In this she was out of step with most Nationals who viewed women’s role in conventional and secondary terms. Her training of ‘Fianna Scouts’, however, was acceptable to the majority. All the couple’s mixed agendas were unified in Casimir’s ‘98’ play The Memory of the Dead, in which Constance starred as a cross dressing revolutionary wife who joins the uprising. This melodrama was popular in Nationalist circles as a physical force corrective to the widely maligned Playboy of the Western World. Casimir, it was assumed in one review was thinking also of Poland as one favourable notice put it. In fact, in 1918–1919, there was to be a successful Polish uprising after the abdication of the Kaiser. Casimir gradually removed himself from Irish politics while his wife’s militancy increased, especially during the Royal visit, when flag burning and other demonstrations rejecting an alien monarchy were common. She was charged with assault on a policeman during a riot, much to her brother’s distress. After this fiasco she and other Nationalists tried to establish a commune in a house in Lower Mount Street; visitors, even those broadly sympathetic to the cause, were astonished by the commune’s bohemian style. Yet one visitor insisted that Casimir didn’t bother about Ireland at all, but was quite happy to attend parties with his wife. The ‘teuf-teuf’ side of Constance was evidently not subdued by radicalism. She still performed in plays at the Independent Dramatic Company and a hostile interpretation of this period in her life might see all her political engagement as acting. Indeed, her performance as an ancient Irish Queen in a pageant at the 1911 Oireachtas, in a glamorous blue velvet gown might reinforce this criticism. The sky darkened in 1913 with the Dublin lock-out; Jim Larkin, the labour leader hid from the police at the Markievicz’s house. In subsequent disturbances she was knocked about by the police ‘who smelled strongly of stout’. This career of assorted political activism, interspersed with theatre inevitably recalls Vanessa Redgrave and the Workers Revolutionary Party, not least in Constance’s effective abandonment of her daughter, Maeve, to be brought up in Lissadell. There is one photograph of the children together, Constance in a beautiful white gown, holding the baby Maeve, with Stanislaus by her side. Of course, Maeve had a more stable home with her grandmother and uncle and aunt than in the unstable rackety life her parents enjoyed in Dublin.

18In the wake of the shootings in Bachelors Walk, itself the subject of a powerful sombre painting by Jack Yeats, the Markievicz ‘family’ was briefly reunited In Dublin in Easter 1915, by ‘family’ Stanislaus referred to his half-sister Maeve. Casimir was in Poland, about to join the Russian army. His Polish loyalties were now thoroughly compromised. Meanwhile, in Dublin Constance more strongly emphasised the female contribution to revolution, not without interludes of drama. including playing Joan of Arc in full armour, another parallel with Vanessa Redgrave (who saw herself as Joan of Arc, according to her sister). However, Constance’s advice to women activists was thoroughly practical—no jewellery, short skirts and strong boots, and no appeals to male chivalry, this very much on the advice of her sister Eva. In the run up to the Easter Rising, she endured raids on her house. which only contained a few Fianna scouts who treated the police to a rendition of ‘The Peeler and the Goat’. She enthusiastically wandered around Dublin fully armed and when Eoin MacNeill tried to call off the rising, threatened to shoot him. In the chaos which ensued, she clearly felt in her element. Her green banner proclaiming the Irish Republic’ flew over the Post Office. She shot and killed an unarmed policeman in Stephens Green. An eyewitness account identified her clearly, however she insisted to Eva Gore-Booth, a pacificist, that she did not shoot him. The policeman died in hospital, rather than on the site, which might explain her error. She holed up in the Royal College of Surgeons, overlooking the Green and helped with food supplies. Here she seems to have converted to Catholicism, with which increasingly Irish Nationalism became identified. She was surprised to see the order to surrender, but accepted it, saying, ‘I trust Connolly’. She kissed her revolver when surrendering it.

19When tried, her bravery vanished, and she begged for her life, pleading her status as a woman, ‘I am only a woman’: a plea not made by Edith Cavell (a nurse, not an armed revolutionary) in equally grim circumstances. Cavell admitted the charges of helping allied prisoners to escape and calmly accepted her fate. In fact, it was probably Edith Cavell’s execution in October 1915 and attendant international moral outrage which saved Constance’s life. She was imprisoned in Kilmainham after her sentence was commuted. The leading men were executed under military orders. There was little sensitivity to Irish public opinion, given that the Easter Rising coincided with the mid-point of the siege of Verdun, Germany’s attempt to ‘bleed France white’, which lead to nearly a million deaths: this is to say nothing of the regular execution at dawn of shell-shocked under-age British soldiers for ‘Cowardice’. Brigadier Blackadder, who presided at the trials had recently seen service in France at Neuve Chappell and Loos.

20When Constance was transferred to Mountjoy prison, her sister was able to visit her. She asked for a photograph of her daughter, whom she thought too young to visit. Eva desperately pressed her sister’s version of not shooting the policeman on Jossyln Gore-Booth. Eva and Esther Roper, both committed pacifists, remained loyal to her. Eva thought the Rising a tragedy. When transferred to an English prison Constance complained to Susan Mitchell of being forced to mix with prostitutes and ‘baby killers’, despite the Prison Governor’s assurance to the Home Office that no woman prisoner had a record of prostitution. She became severely emaciated after apparently refusing to eat fish. She was released as part of the general amnesty in June 1917. Her return to Ireland accompanied by Eva was a triumph.

21Meanwhile Casimir, who had rejoiced at Poland’s brief independence, found himself on the wrong side of all politics when a provisional government of the Ukraine seized all landed property, something in which Constance tactlessly rejoiced when writing to Josslyn. Her survival raised Constance’s status in Ireland: she retrospectively referred to her ‘willingness to die’ in 1916, a predictable revision of her actual stance. She, alongside other Sinn Fein leaders, was imprisoned as part of the 1918 fictitious ‘German Plot’. She and Maud Gonne did not get on together as cell mates. Eva was able to visit her sister in Holloway, but only if they did not discuss politics, an impossible restriction at the time. Other republican women prisoners disliked Constance’s sense of entitlement, however she was chosen to stand for Parliament for a Dublin ward in the 1918 election, despite the fact that her Connolly-influenced socialist conception of a future Ireland remained a minority position. She was elected with an impressive majority, but refused to take her seat. Nevertheless, she received a letter in prison, addressed ‘Dear Sir’ and inviting her to attend the state opening of Parliament.

22With Russia undergoing, a grand scale revolution, the position of both Casimir and Stanislaus was very difficult, the latter being imprisoned by the Bolsheviks. After some pressing, Casimir, briefly a film star in Warsaw, sent a food parcel to his son, eventually freed by the influence of his mother’s socialist friends. Constance’s socialism rather than her republicanism was behind yet another arrest in 1919. She was prepared to endorse the terror under Lenin and the Cheka in the cause of socialism in Russia. But as Arrington makes clear, without guidance from Connolly her ideas remained undirected. In speeches made during her brief absences from Jail she envisaged a workers’republic in Ireland, on the assumed Bolshevik model. When she eventually took her seat in the new Dáil in April 1919 she was appointed secretary for Labour, from this position she lobbied for land reform and in late April 1919 she astonished her audience in Bray by arguing for Bolshevism and de-centralised government by ‘soviets’ as well as an economy based upon co-operative agriculture. Attempts to have her deported were complicated by uncertainty about her nationality, being by marriage a Russian subject. After a series of spirited public appearances, she was again sentenced to two years in Mountjoy in 1920. By now her socialism was being modified by a belief in ‘spiritual forces’ and a return to cultural Nationalism. She was released in 1921 in time to oppose partition. She continued her stubborn belief that the Bolsheviks were on the right path, something her stepson, living in Russia, then experiencing the first of a series of major famines, must have found tiresome. She was pulled up hard by the 1922 election in which she lost her seat and which the pro-Treaty side won. She became quite as bitter as Maud Gonne in her hatred of the Free State.

23In her breezy and somewhat partisan account of the Civil War, Arrington avoids any mention of the destructive measures used by the Republicans, blowing up railway stations, and bridges making it difficult for farmers to get their goods to market as well as outright terror attacks, the aim was to cripple the new Free State, which it did, with £ 10 m. worth of damage.

24In the aftermath of the Civil War Casimir turned up in Dublin, saw his daughter, to whom he tried to justify Constance’s dedication to the cause of liberty: this fell on stony ground. He received a better reception in his favourite bar, Neary’s. He saw Constance before returning to Poland where his politics shifted to the right, with anti-semitism (a commonplace in Poland) emerging. The ceasefire produced depression in Constance, strikingly pictured by Mary Colum who had not seen Constance for several years and had recalled her as a woman in ‘vibrant maturity at the height of her beauty and courage’. Sitting in George Russell’s salon was a faded emaciated figure, her vitality and beauty gone. Constance’s loyalty to de Valera was shaken by his decision to found Fianna Fail and re-enter legitimate politics. She was now an isolated figure, with her contact with Eva her only link with her family. Constance at last made an effort with Maeve, her long estranged daughter. Then Eva died, her closest friend and relation was gone, although she believed herself still in spiritual contact with her sister. Yet as Mary Colum said, Constance Markievicz was an extinct volcano. Her exhausting life and regular periods in prison took its toll and she was admitted to St Patrick Dun’s hospital and died after seeing Casimir and Stanislaus. She was given a grand funeral, which involved lying in state at City Hall. De Valera gave the funeral oration, emphasising her love of the poor and (implicitly) her Republicanism.

25After the funeral Maeve’s anger at her distance from her mother caused her to destroy a cache of letters from Eva. Casimir and Maeve bitterly disputed the estate and the half-siblings also quarrelled but were reconciled at their father’s deathbed in 1932. Arrington’s account of the Markievicz side of the story is very impressive, including a letter from Stanislaus written on linen, smuggled out of a Russian prison, with a plea for a food parcel from his father. In an interesting final chapter on Constance’s legacy, Arrington notes that ‘On a Political Prisoner’ might be read as being about Maud Gonne; this is a shrewd point as Yeats told Lady Gregory that he was writing about Constance to avoid writing about Maud Gonne, so the ambiguity was there in the conception (CL InteLex 3562, 29 January 1919).

26However, and this is a weakness in an otherwise excellent biography, Arrington asserts in an unsustainable generalisation that Yeats was ‘moving towards fascism’, although he strongly condemned both Fascism and Stalinism to Ethel Mannin: ‘every nerve trembles with horror at what is happening in Europe “the ceremony of innocense is d[r]owned”’ (CL InteLex 6530, [6 April 1936]).

27One other reservation in considering this outstanding biography filled with fascinating detail from family letters is Arrington’s equivocation on the issue of William Wylie’s first-hand account of her collapse during her trial and her pleas for mercy. She implicitly questions Leon O’Broin’s use of this episode in his monograph on Wylie. Arrington evidently follows Brian Barton’s assertion (quoted in a footnote) that this is a misogynist fiction. This seems unlikely: Wylie had insisted that secret trials were wrong and that the defendants needed a defence and had switched from prosecutor to de facto defence counsel in the case of several defendants, saving the lives of de Valera, Cosgrave and Willie Corrigan, by so doing. Some of his comments—‘silly girls’ of the female prisoners—seem misogynist now, but that does not invalidate his testimony, misogyny was commonplace at the time. We would have to assume that a barrister, who had gone out of his way to assist the prisoners, and who had insisted that he would do all he could to help them (not an easy thing to do faced with the wonderfully named Brigadier Blackadder, who presided over the trials), after doing his best to help defendants, would then invent this scene. Wylie did not prosecute Connolly, saying that to try a wounded man was wrong. Barton suggests that Wylie’s narrative, drafted in 1939, was the product of fading memory, yet an identical version of Wylie’s narrative of Constance Markievicz’s collapse was circulating in Dublin via Trinity table talk in 1916, even using the same words. I think that in both cases the reluctance to admit this evidence stems from its unpalatable nature and its destabilising of a myth. Constance Markievicz was heroic in prison, but she might not have been heroic throughout her trial.

28Eva and Constance Gore-Booth have been very well served by these biographies, both of which make use of the extensive Gore-Booth family papers in the Northern Ireland PRO. Of the two, the life of Eva Gore-Booth is perhaps the more remarkable, raising her from a brief footnote in history to a vivid and well documented life. The life of her sister is also excellent, replacing a long series of ill-researched biographies and furthermore giving us an insight into the complex Polish side of her life.