Maud Gonne: Lucky Eyes and a High Heart

About the book

About Maud Gonne: Lucky Eyes and a High Heart

Perhaps the most astonishing thing about this passionate hater of England is that she was herself English, "a favoured daughter of a British colonel". Raised from time to time in Ireland, Maud Gonne soon became conscious of the vast gulf between its great Palladian houses and the mud hovels of the estate workers. Her first experiences of revolutionary politics occurred on the Continent, and included a cloak-and-dagger journey to St Petersburg with secret documents sewn into her skirt. But it was in and for Ireland that she mainly fought. There were many facets to her fame. One was her great beauty: Shaw called her "outrageously beautiful" and Yeats was bowled over by her. Her long relationship with Yeats added to the legend: many times he asked her to marry him, but "poets should never marry," she replied. Her performance in his play, Cathleen ni Houlihan "magnificent, and with weird power," he told Lady Gregory became for nationalists "a myth and a battle cry". Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee revealed in her a remarkable penchant for ingenious forms of protest, persuading the electricity workers to extinguish the festive lights, organising a procession of black flags through Dublin. Against the Boer War she organised the largest peaceful demonstration ever held in Dublin a procession of 30,000 schoolchildren. And Maud, who could not bear to kill a bird or see a child hungry, was also prepared to organise violence. (Her husband, Major MacBride, a hero in search of a role, was among those who were executed for the Easter Rising.) But during the unhappy period of the Black and Tans, and of the Civil War, she strove to be a moderating influence; and throughout her career she maintained her humanitarian work, notably for prisoners and for children.

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