Eva Gore-Booth: An Image of Such Politics by Sonja Tiernan (review)

Though nearly forgotten today, when Eva Gore-Booth died in 1926, obituaries appeared internationally, including in the Manchester Guardian, the New York Times, and the Times of London. Yet if Gore-Booth is familiar to us now, it is largely thanks to the poem by William Butler Yeats quoted in this volume's subtitle. That she was a playwright and highly regarded poet is less known. Virtually unknown is her association with tightrope walkers and barmaids; her time working as a "pit-brow lass" in a coal mine; or her role in Winston Churchill's defeat in a 1908 by-election. Sensational anecdotes and quirky details abound in Sonja Tiernan's biography, the first dedicated to this figure who played a key role in the history of British labor, the anti-war movement, women's rights, and Ireland's literature and its national cause in the first decades of the twentieth century. Bringing to bear a decade of impressive and imaginative research, Tiernan offers a fascinating narrative grounded in an authoritative command of the relevant historical, political, and social contexts.

In 1870, Eva Selina Gore-Booth was born into a life of privilege on a large County Sligo estate, granted to a seventeenth-century ancestor. Eva and her siblings, including her better-known sister Constance (later Countess Markievicz), spent their childhood in Lissadell House, built in the 1830s and later made famous by Yeats. Their parents were unusual landlords. Sir Henry, persuaded by the Land League's campaign for tenant farmers' right, reduced his rates significantly below Griffith's evaluation. His wife (born Georgina May Hill) believed in helping women achieve financial independence and ran a training school in practical arts for female tenants. Their son Josslyn went further, facilitating former tenants' purchase of thousands of acres of the estate. The sisters were active in both national politics and the cause of woman suffrage. Eva's feminist interests were inspired by a life-changing encounter in Italy, where she had gone to recover from a "weak chest." There she met Esther Roper, who was to become her lifelong companion. The pampered, sickly Eva left a palatial Georgian house in the sylvan expanses of Sligo for the slums of smoky industrial Manchester to work with Esther for working women's rights, not only to the political franchise, but also to fair working conditions and pay, and to education. Gore-Booth gave speeches, wrote pamphlets as well as newspapers and journals articles, and taught evening classes in Shakespeare, all while writing plays and poetry.

Absent from most accounts of Irish history and culture, Gore-Booth is not unknown to academics. The services rendered in this biography include crucial corrections to the slim record of recent retrieval work. Tiernan provides evidence, for example, to counter the repeated assertion that only one of her plays was ever produced. This is vital in restoring Gore-Booth's literary production to its proper place in the Literary Revival. Tiernan also complicates the persistent characterization of Gore-Booth as an uncompromising pacifist. Although an indefatigable opponent of conscription during World War I, in her Irish anti-war campaign Gore-Booth never used the word "peace," always distinguishing, however implicitly, between militarism in an imperial and in a colonial context. In "Clouds," a poem from the 1890s, for example, she urges Ireland to rise and "Bear the sword of freedom foremost in the strife," and in 1916 she dedicated her anti-war play The Death of Fionovar to the heroes of the Rising in a poem glorifying military action. Tiernan's immersion in both the Irish and the English scene contributes to the acuity of her analysis of what might appear to be irreconcilable tensions and contradictions in Gore-Booth's thought. When it came to suffrage agitation, she broke with those who urged violence (including the Pankhursts); yet in response to the erroneous report that Constance had been killed in combat, Eva considered it worse for Constance to...