Constance Markievicz [Countess]

Life
1868-1927 [née Constance Georgina Gore-Booth], b. 4 Feb. 7, Buckingham Gate, London, eldest daughter of Sir Henry Gore-Booth, of Lissadell, Co. Sligo, and Georgina Hill Gore-Booth, orig. from Tickhill Castle, Yorkshire, and dg. Lord Scarborough; s. of Eva Gore-Booth; ed. at home in Lissadell [built 1832], and the Slade in London, and in Paris; met Casimir Dunin, Count de Markievicz of Staro Zyvotov, Poland, whom she married in 1900 after his wife’s death the previous year; their only child, Maeve Alys, b. 1901, at Lissadell; joined Gaelic League; appeared in George Russell’s Deirdre (1902); fnd. United Arts Club with Casimir and Ellen Duncan, 1907; espoused nationalism having read issues of Peasant and Sinn Féin in cottage at Ballally previously rented by Padraic Colum; member of Inghinidhe na hÉireann with Maud Gonne; fnd. Fianna Éireann, Republican youth-movement, in response to 800-strong rally of Boys Scouts, advertising a meeting for boys ‘willing to work for the independence of Ireland’, 1909; feminist campaigner; ran soup-kitchen in 1913 Lock-Out Strike; departure of Casimir for Ukraine; served at Royal College of Surgeons, Easter Rising 1916, as second-in-command to Michael Mallin; condemned to death for part in Easter Rising, as an officer in James Connolly’s Citizens Army, acting as deputy leader of unit holding College of Surgeons (where she is reputed to have shot a DMP-man at close range with her revolver “Peter the Great”); refused offer of transport from Capt. de Courcy Wheeler (‘No, I shall march at the head of my men ... I shall share their fate’); afterwards reprieved on account of her gender; imprisoned in Aylesbury Gaol; and released under general amnesty, 1917; became Catholic after; converted to Catholicism two weeks after release, influenced by bearing of Mallin before his execution; made Freeman of Sligo, Aug. 1917; MP for St Patrick’s division, Dublin, 1918, and thereby first woman MP elected to Westminster; did not take her seat, and joined Dáil Éireann (22 Jan. 1919); first Minister of Labour in Dáil Éireann; supported Republican side in Civil War; toured America for Republicans; published 2 poems in Catholic Bulletin, 1921-22; visited Jim Larkin in Sing Sing Prison, 1922; defeated in general election, 1922; TD, Dublin Borough South, Aug. 1923; arrested as Republican, Nov. 1923; hunger strike; joined Fianna Fail in 1926, adopting constitutional politics; re-elected, 1927; d. in public ward of St Patrick Dun’s Hospital, 15 July, 1927, attended by Casimir; bur. Glasnevin, with reputed funeral procession of 300,000, and a eulogy by Eamon de Valera, while Kevin O’Higgins was being buried at the same hour; a bibliography was prepared by P. S. O’Hegarty in 1934; there is a romantic portrait by her husband in the National Gallery of Ireland. DIB DIH OCIL

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Works
Esther Roper, ed., Prison Letters of Countess Markievicz, preface by President De Valera [also poems and articles relating to Easter week by Eva Gore-Booth, and a biographical sketch by Esther Roper] (London: Longmans, Green 1934), rep. with an introduction by A. Sebestyn (London: Virago 1986).

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Criticism
Sean O’Faoláin, Constance Markievicz, or The Average Revolutionary London: Jonathan Cape 1934; rev. edn. . London: Cresset 1967; Sphere 1968), and Do., another edn. [Cresset Women’s Voices] (London: Cresset 1987), 220pp.

R. M. Fox, Rebel Irishwomen (Cork: Talbot 1935).

Elizabeth Coxhead, Daughters of Erin: Five Women of the Irish Renascence (London: Secker & Warburg 1965).

Anne Marreco, The Rebel Countess: Life and Times of Constance Markievicz (London: Weidenfeld Nicholson 1967), & Do. [rep. edn.; Women in History Ser.] (Phoenix 2002), 352pp.

Jacqueline Van Voris, Countess de Markievicz in the Service of Ireland (Mass: Amherst 1967).

Caitlín Bean Uí Tallamhain, Rós Fiáin Lois an Daill: leabhar beathaisnéise ar Chuntaois Markievicz (Baile Átha Cliath: Clódhanna Teo 1967).

Oliver Snoddy, ‘Notes on Literature in Irish Dealing with the Fight for Freedom’, in Éire-Ireland, 3, 2 (Summer 1968), pp. 138-48.

Van Voris, Constance de Markievicz: In the Cause of Ireland (Amherst: University of Massachusetts 1968).

Eoin. MacWhite, ‘A Russian Pamphlet on Ireland by Count Markievicz,’ Irish University Review, 1, 1 (Autumn 1970), pp.98-110.

E. Ní Eireamhoin, Two Great Irishwomen (Dublin: Fallon 1971); Diana Norman, Terrible Beauty: A Life of Constance Markievicz (London: Hodder & Stoughton 1987; rep. Poolbeg 1991), 320pp.

Anne Haverty, Countess Markievicz: An Independent Life (London: Pandora 1988); [q.a.], ‘Literary Works of Con Markievicz’, Journal of Irish Literature, XII, 1 (Jan 1989).

Ruth Taillon, When History was Made: The Women of 1916 (Belfast: Beyond the Pale Publ. 1996), 158pp.

Joe McGowan, Constance Markievicz: The People’s Countess (Sligo: Markievicz Millenium Comm. 2003), 136pp.

Margaretta D’Arcy, Prison Voice of Con Markievicz [n.d.].

Seán O’Casey, Irish Citizen Army (Irish Citizen Army 1919).

Joanne Mooney Eichacker, Irish Republican Women in America: Lecture Tours, 1916-1925 (Dublin: IAP 2002), 352pp. [incls. rems. on Constance Markievicz, et al.].

Dermot James, The Gore-Booths of Lissadell (Woodfield Press 2004), 400pp.

Eoin MacWhite, ‘A Russian Pamphlet on Ireland by Count Markievicz’, in Irish University Review (Spring/Summer 1971), pp.98ff.

Liam O’Flaherty (The Martyr, 1933).

Maurice Headlam, Irish Reminiscences (1947).

Cheryl Herr, For the Land They Loved, Syracuse UP 1991).

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 and Neil Sammells, eds., Irish Writing, Subversion and Exile (Macmillan 1991), pp.146-58.

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Notes
Henry Boylan, A Dictionary of Irish Biography [rev. edn.] (Gill & Macmillan 1988), ‘In 1906 she rented a cottage in Ballally in the Dublin Mts. and came across back numbers of The Peasant and Sinn Féin, left by the previous tenant, Padraic Colum [thus] her interest in her country’s struggle for freedom was first aroused.’ Note that the anecdote of her discovering copies of Ryan’s Irish Peasant and Griffith’s Sinn Féin in Colum’s vacated Irish cottage is narrated more substantially in Leon Ó Bróin, Protestant Nationalists (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan 1985), where the Colony started by the Markievicz’s and Hobson at Belcamp House in North Dublin is also related (p.37).

Seamus Deane, gen. ed., Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (Derry: Field Day 1991), Vol. 2, ftn., pp.815-16, in reference to Yeats’s poem: ‘The gazelle is Eva ... poet, later trade union organiser in Britain’.

W. B. Yeats, “Easter 1916”: ‘That woman’s days were spent / In ignorant good-will, / Her nights in argument / Until her voice grew shrill’ (, drafted as: ‘... ignorant good will; / All that she got she spent, / Her charity had no bounds’ (Quoted in Frank Tuohy, Yeats, 1976, p.163).

W. B. Yeats, “On a Political Prisoner” [‘... Recall the years before her mind / Became a bitter, an abstract thing’], and ‘In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Countess Markievicz’ [‘The light of evening, Lissadell, / Great windows, open to the south, / Two girls in silk kimonos, both / Beautiful, one a gazelle’; also, ‘The innocent and the beautiful / Have no enemy but time ... .’]

Huckster’s loins?: A contemporary caricature of Countess Markievicz represents her as ‘Madame Przemysl’ denoting trade in Polish [information supplied by Simon Milligan, UUC.]

The Memory of the Dead, a play by Countess Markievicz for the the Irish Repertory Co., concerns a rebel leader who is saved by a patriot girl. In real life Helena Molony, who played the girl, prayed over Sean Connolly, who played the hero, as he lay dying, the first casualty of the 1916 Rising.

Of any account?: Marcus Wheeler (Belfast) writes in references to a letter of Sir Josslyn Gore-Booth (Irish Times, 25 July 2002) about the status of his great-aunt Constance following her marriage in 1900 to the Polish painter and playwright Kazimierz Markiewicz: ‘He rightly casts doubt on Markiewicz's claim to have been a Count. Authoritative Polish sources state that the Markiewicz family belonged to the szlachta or gentry and that - perhaps by virtue of this - Kazimierz certainly used the title of "Count", but without right. In fact, it appears, this title was not native to Poland; and Poles could have acquired it legitimately only as citizens of the Russian or Austro-Hungarian Empires or as recipients of an honour conferred by the Holy See.’

Cathach Books, Cat. No. 12, lists a copy of Maurice Maeterlinck, Aglavaine and Selysette, a play in five acts (1891), signed by C. Gore-Booth, with ded. in French on frontleaf.

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Princess Grace Irish Library (Monaco)