Maud Gonne's Irish Nationalist Writings 1895-1946 (review)

Maud Gonne has been known by her relationships with men. A significant portion of past and present criticism treating of Gonne considers her life for those points at which it intersects the lives of other distinguished persons, such as her lover of thirteen years, Lucien Millevoye, her husband John MacBride, a martyr of the Easter Rising, and, of course, William Butler Yeats. In Maud Gonne's Irish Nationalist Writings, a collection of Gonne's political writings amassed from newspapers, journals, and speeches, Karen Steele points out that "Maud Gonne's exceptional beauty, as well as her fate as the muse and obsessive talking point of W.B. Yeats, has often distracted readers [from her own] significant contributions to Irish History."

As Steele notes, little attention has been given to Gonne's extensive writings save her autobiography, AServant of the Queen (1938), and to various collected letters between her and Yeats—most recently, in Norman Jeffares's and Anna MacBride White's The Gonne-Yeats Letters 1893-1938. It is ironic, then, that though Yeats's love for Gonne grew in large part from his fascination with her strength of personality and outspokenness, "the spell of her own voice" is often lost in our current critical analyses. Too often, Gonne's identity recedes behind the many masks and veils that Yeats, among others, creates for her. Yeats's autobiographical publications that addressed her life and work often subsume her own written documents. As Steele suggests, "[Gonne's] polemical contributions and polemical voice continue to be interpreted by those who elegantly and often damningly call her to mind as Cathleen Ni Houlihan."

However, Gonne herself was also complicit in the myth-making. Her letters to Yeats show that she did not resent the way Yeats portrayed her in his poetry. On the contrary, Gonne repeatedly describes herself as quite pleased with the poems Yeats sent her, and at one point refers to his poems as their "offspring." At various times, Gonne chose to invoke the image of Cathleen as a symbol of her own persona. In Steele's view, this invocation was due, in large part, to Gonne's attempt to legitimate her self and work in a "political realm that was strongly suspicious of her wealth, accent and gender" as well as to "authorize her own anomalous place in the national struggle."

Steele has collected seventy-eight of Gonne's nationalist editorials into seven sections, organized under the themes of "Amnesty," "The Cause of Ireland," "The Downtrodden," "Trans-national Solidarity," "The Literary Revival," "The Failures of the Free State," and "Partition and the North." Her introductions to each section place Gonne's work in the contexts of Irish nationalist propaganda, New Women's' journalism, feminism and nationalism, social justice advocacy, and savvy "freelance-activism" in order to reestablish Gonne as a "creative and potent contributor in her own right."

"Amnesty" supports and further emphasizes one important consistency throughout both Gonne's political writings and actions: their firm rootedness in, and appeal to, personal experience. Her "sense of justice" springs directly from her experiences and witness of poverty, suffering, and mistreatment. In her 1924 editorial, Gonne writes about the unjust treatment of Irish prisoners of war from her place beside "hundreds of other mothers" with whom she "kept vigil days and nights outside the walls of Mountjoy." In "Conditions of Prisoners" from Republican File (1931), Gonne argues for an improvement in the living conditions in prisons by speaking from her own experience: "As one who was also for a short time a prisoner in Arbour Hill . . . I can say from personal knowledge" that the prison conditions are deplorable. In "Famine! My Experiences in Mayo," which appeared in the Daily Nation in 1898, Gonne emphasizes her own work in humanitarian reform. Trying to raise awareness about the "distress of the West," she writes: "As words are meaningless to a child at first, till from experience they...