Life
1865-1953 [Madame MacBride]; b. 20 Dec., at Tongham, nr. Aldershot, dg.
of Thomas Gonne, army officer of Tipperary family descent and later London
wine-merchants; posted in Dublin, 1868 [var. 1869]; dg. of English mother
Edith Frith née Cooke (d.1871), being dg. William Cooke whose father
William made a large fortune in wholesale merchandising in Norfolk; father
posted to India; ed. France; acted as hostess to her father in Dublin
from 1882 to his death in 1885, by which time he had agreed to support
her in her struggle for Home Rule as a result of the Land League movement
(‘the people have a right to the land’); sickened by an eviction
she witnessed at Falcarragh, Co. Donegal, 1888; abandoned career as actress
through illness; while recovering from TB [haemorrhage] at Royat in Auvergne,
1887, she fell in love and became the mistress of Lucien Millevoye, a
(Boulangist) journalist and anti-semitic politician fighting for French
possession of Alsace-Lorraine; her first child by him (he being married),
a son Georges [var. Georgette] (b. May-29 July), d. 31 Aug., of meningitis
(she kept his little boots all her life and died holding them); on return
to Dublin, met childhood friend, Ida Jameson, and was introduced to C.
H. Oldham, fndr. of Contemporary Club through which she met John O’Leary
and his dg. Ellen, and through the latter W. B. Yeats when she visited
the Yeats’s home at Bedford Park in London, 30 Jan. 1889 (although
she always insisted that they first met at the Contemporary Club); Maud
Gonne introduced to Order of Golden Dawn by Yeats in 1890, and admitted
as a postulant, and member of the Isis-Urania Temple, 31 Nov. 1891; travelled
to Paris, carrying the vellum book of poems Yeats had given her; deeply
unhappy in relationship with Millevoye after he accused her of using sex
for political gain, July 1891; Yeats proposed marriage, Aug. 1891; travelled
on board the mailboat carrying Parnell’s body back to Ireland, 7
Oct. 1891, at a period when she herself was in mourning for her child,
collected by Yeats upon arrival at Kingstown; attended Parnell’s
funeral at Glashnevin and reports having witnessed with others a ‘shooting
star’; tells Yeats that a child she had adopted had died; encouraged
by George Russell to believe that an infant soul can be reincarnated to
a family; a second child was named Iseult (1895-1954),
and referred to as her mother’s ‘adopted neice’ in Dublin;
Yeats writes The Countess Kathleen for her, 1892, and they argue
over performance rights; toured Ireland establishing branches (to the
number of three) of the Irish Nat. Lit. Soc. library; lectured on the
Irish Famine in Luxembourg; found herself excluded as a woman from National
Literary Society and National League (successor to Land League); involved
with Yeats in establishing an Irish mystical order at the ‘Castle
of Heroes’ to be constructed on Lough Key, Co. Roscommon, 1896-1902;
addressed public meetings, with Yeats, as part of the Wolfe Tone Commemoration
Committee focussed on the erection of a statue at St. Stephen’s Green,
and the Humbert memorial in Ballina (causing Anne Horniman to say, ‘The
greatest poet ... is always helpless beside a beautiful woman screaming
from a cart’, as recounted by Hone, in W. B. Yeats, p.210);
failed to support Yeats against Duffy in the Irish National Library publishing
fracas; confessed to Yeats her physical relationship with Millevoye, 1898;
broke with Millevoye in 1899, as a consequence of his connection with
another woman, and confessed to Yeats ‘with clenched hands’
her ‘horror and terror of physical love’ (Memoirs); fnd.
L’Irlande libre, organe de la colonie irlandaise à Paris,
edited with Miss M. Barry Delaney from May 1897; edited Journal des
voyages, in which [s]he printed ‘Le Martyre de l’Irelande’
in 6 issues between 1891 and 1894; demonstrated against Queen Victoria’s
Diamond Jubilee (60th) celebrations in Dublin by decorating patriot graves
(‘Must the graves of our dead go undecorated because Victoria has
her jubilee?’); organised mock funeral of British Empire on Jubilee
Night, leading to riots; accused Yeats of making her do the only cowardly
thing in her life when he restrained her from entering the affray (‘Maud
has a look of exultation as she walks with her laughing head thrown back’);
published ‘The Famine Queen’ in The United Irishman at
arrival of Queen Victoria in Dublin (4 April 1900); organised counter-demonstration
of 40,000 children, culminating in oath-making ceremony in Drumcondra,
April 1900; fnd. Inghinidhe na h-Éireann, women’s organisation
in Dublin, 1900, with Ethna Carbery as vice-president to her death in
1902; appeared in majestic role in The Last Feast of the Fianna
(1900), performed on festival of Lughnasa, 1900, with Maud Gonne in strikingly
majestic pose; Inghinidhe na hEireann stages Eilís agus an Bhean
Déirce, a one-act play by P. T. MacFhionnlaoich (Antient Concert
Rooms, 27 Aug. 1901); takes lead role in Yeats/Gregory play Cathleen
ni Houlihan, 2-4th April 1902, appearing at theatre for first performance
dressed as the Old Woman of the play; refused Yeats again (‘The world
will thank me for not marrying you’); vetoed Lady Gregory’s
Twenty-Five in 1902 on grounds it made emigration seem too lucrative;
converted to Catholicism (formally received Feb. 1903), and m. John MacBride,
21 Feb. 1903, Paris; member of National Council protesting visit of Edward
VII, she aroused hostility to attempt to present Loyal Address to the
king and hung out black petticoat on a broomstick for death of Leo XIII
in contrast with Union Jacks to honour him, 1903; walked out in protest
during performance of In the Shadow of the Glen (Oct. 1903); resigned
with Dudley Digges and Maire Quinn and others from Irish National Dramatic
Co., objecting to the anti-Irish libel; her play Dawn an anti-English
Famine play, unstaged, but publ. United Irishman (29 Oct. 1904);
Seán, a son, b. Paris 1904; breakdown of marriage with MacBride;
Quinn hires detectives to investigate MacBride’s fund-raising tour
of 1904, but is stonewalled by patriots; legal separation from MacBride,
accusing him of drunkenness, violence, and sexual assault [‘pires
immoralités’] on her 18 year-old half sister (who later
married MacBride’s brother Joseph), 1905; Maud Gonne was expelled
from Cumann na nGaedhael for lack of an Irish pedigree on information
from MacBride; interview with the Paris Correspondent of New York Evening
World appeared under the caption, ‘A Brainy Woman should not
Wed’ (13 Aug. 1905); Maud Gonne enters Abbey Theatre for the first
night of Lady Gregory’s The Gaol Gate with Yeats in 1905 (‘Up
John MacBride!’); stung by accusations of not being racially Irish;
makes home in France to avoid MacBride’s gaining custody; hissed
when attending Abbey with Yeats and her son Sean, Oct. 1906; achieved
extension of the Free Meals legislation to Irish school-children, 1906;
gained church separation, Jan. 1908; prob. consummated her relationship
with Yeats physically in Dec. 1908, on evidence of letters; fnd. paper,
Bean na hEireann, (1908) with Helena Molony as ed.; organised meals
for children effected by Dublin floods, St. Audoen’s Church, 1910;
remained in Paris at her apartment in Passy, spending summers at Les Mouettes,
Colville [var. Colleville], nr. Calvados, to 1917, after MacBride’s
execution for his part in the 1916 Rising; visited by Yeats and Everard
Fielding (sec. of Psychical Soc.), and visits bleeding pictures at Mirabeau,
nr. Poitiers, kneeling at the scene, May 1914 - soon after shown to be
inauthentic miracles by Lister Inst.; Yeats proposes to her again, and
then with her permission to Iseult, in Normandy; crossed to Dublin disguised
as nurse, Feb. 1918 [err. Dec., Tuohy]; turned away by Yeats from 73,
St. Stephen’s Green (the house she rented and allowed him to use),
Mrs Yeats being pregnant and suffering from pneumonia; arrested in Dublin,
May 1918, and imprisoned in Holloway for five-and-a-half months, being
released with suspected tuberculosis after intervention by Yeats; returned
to St. Stephen’s Green in place of the Yeats, Christmas 1918; pressured
Iseult and Francis Stuart into marriage after their elopement to London,
1920; initially supported the Treaty side in the Civil War, but turned
to the Republicans after the attack on the Four Courts; acted as White
Cross relief; arrested January 1923 (informing Yeats a day previously
that ‘if I did not denounce the Government, she renounced my society
for ever’); allowed her house to be used for publication of second
issue of Con Levanthal’s and Francis Stuart’s paper To-morrow,
1924; supported Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington and others in The Plough and
the Stars controversy, at the public debate with O’Casey in the
Universities’ Republican Club, 1926; subject of a tribute for work
on behalf of republican prisoners, 1932; described by Brigit O’Hullane
as ‘one of the greatest Irishwoman who ever lived’; published
A Servant of the Queen, autobiography of her life up to her marriage,
serialised in The Irish Press, 1938-39, it celebrating sacrificial
nationalism (‘life out of death, life out of death eternally’)
and point de départ of a noted passage in McNeice’s
Autumn Journal (1939); visited Yeats at Riversdale shortly before
his death (‘Maud, we should have gone on with our Castle of Heroes,
we might still do it.’); an IRA man arrested by the police is found
to have a letter signed Maud Gonne MacBride (Yeats, ‘What a woman!
What vitality! What energy!’); latterly lived at Roebuck Hse; d.
of cancer; bur. Republican plot, Glasnevin; there is an unfinished autobiographical
manuscript of her later years entitled ‘The Tower of Age’; Ethel
Mannin dedicated Connemara Journal (1947) to ‘Maud Gonne MacBride’.
DIB DIH FDA OCIL
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Works
Plays, Dawn, in Robert Hogan & James
Kilroy, eds., Lost Plays of the Irish Renaissance (Delaware: Proscenium
1970), pp.73-84.
Prose, Karen Steele, ed., Maud Gonne: Irish Nationalist Writings, 1895-1946 (Dublin: IAP 2004), 344pp.; Anna MacBride White & A. N. Jeffares, eds., The Gonne-Yeats Letters, 1893-1938: Always Your Friend (London: Hutchinson; NY: Norton 1992), 544pp. ill. [incl. 372 letters by Maud Gonne and 30 by Yeats]; A Servant of the Queen (London: V. Gollancz 1938) [autobiog.], and Do., as A. N. Jeffares & Anna MacBride White, eds., A Servant of the Queen [rev. ed.] (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe 1994), 378pp. [incl. new material and rearranges chapters in correct MS order].
Miscellaneous, ‘A National Theatre’, in United Irishman (24 Oct. 1903), [q.p.];‘A propos de J. M. Synge, Les entretiens idéalistes 15 (Jan. 1914), pp.31-33 [English translation in K. P. S. Jochum, ‘Maud Gonne on Synge’, Éire-Ireland, 6, 4 (Winter 1971), pp.65-70]; contributed to Stephen Gwynn, ed., Scattered Branches: Tributes to the Memory of W. B. Yeats (London: Macmillan 1940); ‘Un Peuple Opprimé’ [her first article published in France], Nouvelle Revue Internationelle [q.d.], rep. in Études Irlandaises (Printemps 1997), pp.9-13; also Ella Young, Celtic Wonder Tales, ill. and decorated by Maud Gonne (Dublin: Maunsel 1910, rep. Floris Book Club, Edinburgh 1988 1991).
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- Chris Healy, Confessions of a Journalist, 2nd ed. (London: Chatto & Windus 1904), pp.227-31 [Gonne as Irish St Joan and her hopes of the French];
- Elizabeth Coxhead, ‘Maud Gonne’, in Daughters of Erin: Five Women of the Irish Renascence (London: Secker & Warburg 1965);
- A. N. Jeffares, ‘Pallas Athene Gonne’, in Tributes in Prose and Verse to Shotaro Oshima (Tokyo: Hokuseido 1970), pp.4-7;
- K. P. S. Jochum, ‘Maud Gonne on Synge’, Éire-Ireland, 6, 4 (Winter 1971), pp.65-70;
- S[amuel] Levenson, Maud Gonne: A Biography of Yeats’s Beloved (London: Cassell 1976), 436pp.;
- Nancy Cardozo, Maud Gonne: Lucky Eyes and a High Heart (London: Victor Gollancz 1979; rep. New Amsterdam Books 1990);
- Margaret Ward, Unmanageable Revolutionaries (London: Pluto 1983);
- Margary Brady, The Love Story of W. B. Yeats and Madu Gonne (Cork: Mercier 1990);
- Margaret Ward, Maude Gonne: Ireland’s Joan of Arc (London: Pandora 1990), 223pp., 16 pls. [rep. as Maud Gonne: A Life];
- C. L. Innes, ‘“A Voice in Directing the Affairs of Ireland”, L’Irlande libre, The Shan Van Vocht, and Bean na h-Eireann’, in Paul Hyland & Neil Sammells, eds., Irish Writing, Subversion and Exile (London: Macmillan 1991), pp.146-58);
- Deirdre Toomey, ‘Labyrinths: Yeats and Maud Gonne’, in Toomey, ed., Yeats and Women [Yeats Annual No. 9] (London: Macmillan 1992), pp.95-131;
- Margaret Ward, ‘Maud Gonne: Ireland’s Joan of Arc’, in Deirdre Toomey, ed., Yeats and Women [Yeats Annual No. 9] (London: Macmillan 1992), pp.336-41;
- Anthony J. Jordan, Willlie Yeats and the Gonne-MacBrides (Ballyhaunis: [the author] 1997) and Barry Shortall, Willie and Maud: A Love Story (London: Collins 2002), 336pp.
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Notes
Heart’s desire:
Yeats recorded a dream shared with Maud Gonne in
1889, when she told him of sexual relations with Lucien Millevoye: ‘She
thought herself a great stone statue through which passed flame, and I
felt myself becoming flame and mounting up through and looking out of
the eyes of a great stone Minerva.’ (Donoghue, ed., Memoirs,
1972, p.134.)
Yeats’s Proposal: Maud Gonne refused Yeats’s marriage proposal in these terms: ‘No Willie, the world will thank me for not marrying you. Let us continue to be such close friends - and go on writing me those lovely poems.’ (Intro., Love Poems by W. B. Yeats, Kyle Cathie, 1990, p.5; cited in Gaw, UUC MA 1999’).
Georg(ette): According to some Gonne’s first child was a boy, George; according to others a girl, Georgette, born in May 1889 (Levenson, 1977).
Untitled manuscript: ‘The essay on the bleeding oleograph is in the handwriting of aud Gonne, who wrote at Yeats’s dictation. It begins with the arrival at Mirabeau of yeats, Maud, and Everard F[ei]lding, who had been sent to “investigate a miracle”, nad ends with their leaving impressed but uncertain. Two months later Feilding informed Yeats that the blood was not human blood. Always eager to experiment, Yeats was never credulous’ (See George Mills Harper, ed., Yeats and the Occult, London: Macmillan 1976, p.8 [Introd.].)
Cathleen Ni Houlihan: In the All-Ireland Review, edited by Standish James O’Grady, a notice on Cathleen Ni Houlihan (1902), spoke of ‘Maud Gonne, the well-known nationalist agitator, addressing not the actors, as is usual in the drama, but the audience’ (Roy Foster, Apprentice Mage, 1996, p.367; cited in Richard Mitchell, BA Diss., 1997.)
Icon of Nationalism: Dorothy MacArdle testifies that Cathleen Hi Houlihan became one of the sacred works of Sinn Féin and the Republican Movements (The Irish Republic, Corgi 1968, p.58; cited in Flannery, 1976, p.100).
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In the Shadow of the Glen: Gonne walked out of the first performance of In the Shadow of the Glen, 8th Oct. 1903. (See K. P. S. Jochum, ‘Maud Gonne on Synge’, in Éire-Ireland, Winter 1971, p.67).
Denis Johnston refers to the early revolutionary period as ‘the Maud Gonne era’. (See the Introduction to The Scythe and the Sunset, reprinted in Dublin Magazine, Spring 1966.)
Catholic baptism: Maud Gonne was baptised in the Roman Catholic religion by Monsignor Pierre-Joseph Geary, Bishop of Laval, Feb. 1903. (See Conor Cruise O’Brien, Ancestral Voices, Poolbeg 1994, pp.70ff.).
Bleeding Hearts: W. B. Yeats and Maud Gonne visited a supposedly blood-secreting oil painting of Sacred Heart at Mirabeau in France; Maud Gonne fell to her knees; Lister Institute tested exudate swabbed by the local curé and found it to be other than human. (See Brenda Maddox, Yeats’s Ghosts, 1999, p.13.)
“Easter 1916”: Maud Gonne, to whom Yeats’s ‘Easter 1916’ was read in August on a seashore in Normandy, found the poem ‘wholly inadequate to the occasion,’ according to Rothenstein, quoted by J. H. Hone, in W. B. Yeats 1865-1939 (London 1965), p.300. She wrote elsewhere on the deaths of the 1916 Rising leaders, ‘The deaths of those leaders are full of beauty and romance. They will be speaking forever, the people will hear them forever’ (quoting Yeats’s Cathleen ni Houlihan; q. source; poss. review of Gonne-Yeats letters.]
Town house: Maud Gonne received from Madame Despard, radical socialist and sister of Lord French, the gift of her Dublin home when the latter moved to Belfast. (See under Despard in Hickey and Doherty, eds., Dictionary of Irish History, 1980).
Ineffable death: Maud Gonne-MacBride’s death, 17th April, and last words (‘I feel now an ineffable joy’) is reported in a letter from Iseult to Francis Stuart; see Geoffrey Elborn, Francis Stuart (1990), p.236.
Brian Moore, in Judith Hearne (1955): ‘Maud Gonne MacBride, once the most beautiful woman in Ireland’ (p.214), spoken in the course of Judith’s fantasy of life as grande dame in the Catholic Irish milieu of this novel.
Brendan Behan used to perform a comic turn called ‘Maud Gonne at the Microphone’ , with a towel around his head, consisting of ‘fruity recollections of Yeats in a quavering, aged, but, of certain undertones, deeply expressive voice.’ (Anthony Cronin, Dead as Doornails, 1976; cited in cited in P. J. Kavanagh, Voices in Ireland, 1994, p.290.)
Two Broomsticks: On the subject of Maud Gonne hanging out a black petticoat on a broomstick for Leo XIII in contrast with Union Jacks officially displayed to honour Edward in 1903, Conor Cruise O’Brien wonders how she got around without her ‘usual mode of conveyance’. (See O’Brien, Ancestral Voices: Religion and Nationalism in Ireland, Dublin: Poolbeg 1994, q.p.)
Annie Smithson, novel issued a novel based on the career of Maud Gonne entitled The Walk of a Queen (1922).
Shambles Corner (London: Flamingo 1993, 320pp.) is a satirical novel by Edward Toman - a founder of the NI Civil Rights Movement - with Dr Oliver Cromwell McCoy, Father Schnozzl Durante; Maud Gonne McGuffin, Francis Xavier Pacelli Feely, Sister Immaculata Mcgillacuddy and Cardinal Big Mac Maguire as characters.
Portraits, A charcoal portrait by Séan O’Sullivan (1929), is held by the National Gallery of Ireland [Breffny, ed., Cultural Encyclopedia, p.177]; an oil portrait by Sarah Purser also hangs in Municipal Gallery, and there is a bust by Laurence Campbell in the Municipal Gallery, Dublin, which Yeats made the subject of a “A Bronze Head” (‘Human, superhuman, a bird’s round eye, / Everything else withered and mummy-dead’ (Collected Poems, p.382); shown in Hone, W. B. Yeats (p.502), though actually painted bronze.Also, ‘But even at the starting-post, all sleek and new, / I saw the wildness in her.’ (Quoted in Brenda Maddox, Yeats’s Ghosts: The Secret Life of W. B. Yeats, NY: HarperCollins 1999, p.367.)
Catherine Fay, W. B. Yeats and His Circle (Nat. Library of Ireland 1989), portraits: Chap. 6., A portrait of Maud Gonne by Sarah Purser hangs in Municipal Gallery; see also Anne Crookshank, Ulster Mus. Portrait Exhibition (1965), and J. M. Hone, W B Yeats (1942), p.102, and Frank Tuohy, Yeats (1976), p.172; see also Maud Gonne as Cathleen ni Houlihan in James W. Flannery, Yeats and the Idea of a Theatre (Toronto: Macmillan 1976; rep. pb. Yale UP 1989), pl. 4 [permission of Michael Yeats].
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Princess Grace Irish Library (Monaco)