Maud Gonne MacBride, the committed republican, agitator and campaigner, was particularly disturbed by the plight of the poor during the difficult winter a century ago in Ireland. It moved her to write to this newspaper to demand urgent action as “the cold, added to the hunger will destroy the health of thousands, sowing seeds of consumption [TB], and will cause the death of many if something is not done at once”.
Advocating for the poor was just one layer of Gonne’s exceptional range of activism. Her life and career are the focus of a campaign launched this month by the new Maud Gonne Society, spearheaded by Irish writer Orna Ross, to erect a statue to commemorate Gonne in Dublin city centre.
The initiative is a reminder that the recently concluded commemorations to mark the revolutionary decade 1913-23, while doing much to complicate narratives and include hitherto neglected lives and deaths, also left lingering questions about those still sidelined. Ross sees Gonne as falling into that category, reminding us that she “was never a passive muse to a love poet”. It is often through the prism of WB Yeats’s poems and his obsession with her that her name is invoked.
Gonne was certainly a hell of a lot more than that. By 1924, as she wrote of the scale of Irish privation, she had decades of frenetic political activity and subversion behind her, and her priorities were even more interesting because of her privileged background.
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Born in a manor in Surrey, she was the daughter of a British army captain of Irish descent whose family were wealthy wine importers. Moving between England, France and Ireland, and radicalised by the plight of Irish evictees, she became involved in aspects of the land war in the 1880s and immersed herself in the company of advanced nationalists, though as a woman she was excluded from membership of the Celtic Literary Society and the Irish Republican Brotherhood.
Unconventional and wealthy due to her inheritance, she also had a passionate affair with the married journalist and right-wing French politician Lucien Millevoye, with whom she had two children.
She also founded the nationalist women’s organisation Inghinidhe na hÉireann in 1900. Present at the inaugural meeting of the National Literary Society, she performed the lead role in Yeats’s play Cathleen Ní Houlihan in 1902 to much acclaim.
Such standing had soured four years later when she was hissed at by members of an Abbey audience in the aftermath of what was regarded as a sensational court case. Her marriage to Irish Boer war soldier and republican John MacBride had been an unmitigated disaster; always a mismatch, it ended with accusations against MacBride of drunken violence, adultery and molestation of her daughter.
Gonne won custody of Seán, the couple’s only child, but the dispute divided nationalist opinion. As historians Caoimhe Nic Dháibhéid and Margaret O’Callaghan put it, “as a failed wife, her public space was forfeit. The mystique that had protected her from the usual social attitudes towards women had been removed ... she took care never again to present herself as a free and untrammelled woman”.
Her fortunes were reversed by MacBride’s subsequent martyrdom owing to his execution after his fighting role in the 1916 Rising. Gonne embraced his now revered status. She continued with her welfare work, was imprisoned in 1918 and continually advocated for political prisoners during the upheavals of 1919-23. Though she initially supported the Anglo-Irish Treaty, partly due to her friendship with Arthur Griffith, she came to reject it and was an avowed enemy of the Free State while also promoting the work of the Irish White Cross charity.
[ Women activists and US funds: The formation of the Irish White CrossOpens in new window ]
When she died in 1953, The Irish Times paid tribute to her courage, grace and dignity, and famed beauty, which featured in everything written about her as few disputed the assertion of Yeats that she was “the most beautiful woman of her time”. But the obituaries were also duly decorous, one referring to her as “perhaps the last of the Romantic Republicans”. This was reductive given the complications of her life, the currents she swam against and the prejudices she embraced, including her deep anti-Semitism, denunciation of the work of playwright JM Synge and sympathy towards aspects of fascism in the 1930s.
It is worth considering why Gonne did not feature prominently in the decade of commemorations. Her independent mindedness, upending of social norms and decrying of an abusive, alcoholic man set her apart. Her focus on Europe was also distinctive and her journalistic endeavours had included starting her own journal, L’Irlande Libre, to internationalise the case for Irish self-determination.
Any future tour guide stopping at a statue of Gonne would have to devote considerable time to do justice to her complexity and robustness. Given the paucity of memorials to women adorning our capital, it would surely be a worthwhile addition.