One day in June 1889, she arrived at the door of the Yeats family home in London. She said John O'Leary had sent her. "All the trouble of my life began," W.B. Yeats would later remark of this meeting. His sister Lolly didn't like the way she smiled at everyone "with a royal smile", while Lily, his other sister, noted with disapproval that their visitor was wearing slippers. But Yeats was captivated by the young woman, who told them her name was Maud Gonne, writes Brian Maye.
Tomorrow is the 50th anniversary of Maud Gonne's death. She was born in 1865 in Aldershot to a wealthy army colonel of Irish descent and an English mother. She was educated in France and moved to Dublin in 1882 when her father was posted there, where she mixed with the ruling class.
Her father died in 1886 but left her financially independent. She moved back to France where she fell in love with Lucien Millevoye, who was already married. He was editor of La Patrie, a militantly nationalist journal. She had two children by him: a son, Georges, who died in infancy and a daughter, Iseult. Gonne and Millevoye worked together to promote French and Irish nationalist causes.
Her journey away from her background had been gradual. She had met Michael Davitt, campaigner for tenant-farmer rights, in 1887 if not earlier. It is not clear when exactly she met John O'Leary, the veteran Young Irelander and Fenian. Both men had a profound influence on her - not least through the introduction to Yeats, who remained infatuated with her for the rest of his life and dedicated some of his best poetry to her. She helped him set up the National Literary Society in London in 1891, the year of his first unavailing marriage proposal to her; to all subsequent proposals the answer was always the same.
She was responsible for drawing Yeats into radical nationalist activity. She went to Donegal in the early 1890s, where mass evictions were causing near-famine conditions. There she organised the tenants to resist eviction and set up soup kitchens and temporary camps for evicted families. The fact that she had to leave for France to avoid arrest indicates the success of her endeavours.
Returning to Paris and Millevoye, she published a nationalist newsletter called L'Irlande Libre, which highlighted the injustices of British rule in Ireland. It was distributed free to French, British and American newspapers. Her relationship with Millevoye ended in the late 1890s and she returned to Ireland.
Arthur Griffith, whom she had first met several years earlier, was another prominent young men of his generation to be attracted to Maud. His pet name for her was "Queen". She raised funds for Griffith's United Irishman and was a frequent contributor. When the Boer War started, she helped set up the Irish-Transvaal Committee and threw herself into campaigning against Irish recruitment to the British army. She also vigorously opposed Queen Victoria's visit to Ireland in 1900, notably in an article for the United Irishman called "The Famine Queen".
Griffith unintentionally provided the inspiration for the organisation established by Maud Gonne on Easter Sunday 1900: Inghínidhe na hÉireann. A group of women met that day, among other things to collect money for a strong blackthorn stick with a silver handle to replace Griffith's South African sjambok (a whip made of dried hide), which had been broken when he assaulted the editor of Figaro, a Dublin gossip journal which had claimed Maud Gonne was in the pay of Dublin Castle. (Griffith was jailed for two weeks for his action.) Out of this meeting grew the Inghínidhe.
One of their activities of the Inghinidhe was to run drama classes and in 1902 Maud played the lead role in Cathleen Ni Houlihan, the play Yeats wrote especially for her. So moving was her performance that Stephen Gwynn wrote afterwards in his diary that such plays should not be performed unless men were prepared to go out to shoot and be shot. And Yeats many years later asked in a poem: "Did that play of mine send out/ Certain men the English shot?"
Gonne and Griffith visited Paris in late 1900 to meet John MacBride who had been fighting on the side of the Boers. This was her first meeting with MacBride, with whom she went to the US on a lecture tour the following year. They married in 1903 despite Griffith's plea to her: "I know you both, you so unconventional, a law to yourself; John so full of conventions." The embittered Yeats's image of MacBride as "a drunken vainglorious lout" is well known. The marriage lasted only a year but produced a son, Seán. MacBride returned to Dublin after the divorce but Maud remained in Paris, afraid she might lose custody of the child if she came back to Ireland.
She eventually returned in 1917 following the execution of John MacBride for his part in the 1916 Rising. She was imprisoned for six months under the "German plot" allegations of 1918. During the War of Independence, she worked for the White Cross, relieving Irish victims of the war. During the Civil War she took the anti-Treaty side for which her son Seán fought. She co-founded the Women's Prisoners Defence League to help republican prisoners and their families.
For the rest of her life she supported the republican cause (her son was chief of staff of the IRA in the late 1930s). In 1938 she published her autobiography, A Servant of the Queen, which told the story of her life until 1903. She lived at Roebuck House in Clonskeagh in Dublin until her death and is buried in the republican plot in Glasnevin cemetery.
To Yeats she was a Homeric heroine. "For she had fiery blood/ When I was young,/ And trod so sweetly proud/ As 'twere upon a cloud,/ A woman Homer sung,/ That life and letters seem/ But an heroic dream."