Maud Gonne

English-born Irish revolutionary, suffragette and actress. Of Anglo-Irish stock and birth, she was won over to Irish nationalism by the plight of evicted people in the Land Wars. She also actively agitated for Home Rule. In 1882 her father, an army officer, was posted to Dublin. She accompanied him and remained with him until his death. She went to France after a bout of tuberculosis and fell in love with a right wing politician, Lucien Millevoye. They agreed to fight for Irish independence and to regain Alsace-Lorraine for France. She returned to Ireland and worked tirelessly for the release of Irish political prisoners from jail. In 1889, she first met William Butler Yeats, who fell in love with her. In 1890 she returned to France where she once again met Millevoye and had a son, Georges, with him. Georges died, possibly of meningitis, in 1891. In Dublin, London and Paris she was attracted to the occultist and spiritualist worlds deeply important to Yeats, asking his friends about the reality of reincarnation. In 1891 she briefly joined the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a magical organisation with which Yeats had involved himself. Gonne separated from Millevoye after Georges' death, but in late 1893 she arranged to meet him at the mausoleum in Samois-sur-Seine and, next to the coffin, they had sexual intercourse. Her purpose was to conceive a baby with the same father, to whom the soul of Georges would transmigrate in metempsychosis. In August 1894 Gonne and Millevoye's daughter Iseult was born. (At age 23, Iseult was proposed to by then-52-year-old William Butler Yeats, and she had a brief affair with Ezra Pound. At age 26, Iseult married the Irish-Australian novelist, Francis Stuart, who was then 18 years old). During the 1890s Gonne travelled extensively throughout England, Wales, Scotland and the United States campaigning for the nationalist cause, forming an organization called the "Irish League" (L'Association Irlandaise) in 1896. In 1897, along with Yeats and Arthur Griffith, she organised protests against Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee. In Paris in 1903, after having turned down at least four marriage proposals from Yeats between 1891 and 1901, Maud married Major John MacBride, who had led the Irish Transvaal Brigade against the British in the Second Boer War. The following year their son Seán MacBride was born. Afterwards Gonne and her husband agreed to end their marriage. (MacBride was executed in May 1916 along with James Connolly and other leaders of the Easter Rising). Gonne remained very active in Paris. In 1913, she established L'Irlande Libre, a French newspaper. In 1918, she was arrested in Dublin and imprisoned in England for six months. Maud Gonne MacBride published her autobiography in 1938, A Servant of the Queen, a reference to both a vision she had of the Irish queen of old, Cathleen (or Caitlin) Ní Houlihan and an ironic title considering Gonne's Irish Nationalism and rejection of the British monarchy. Her son, Seán MacBride, was active in politics in Ireland and in the United Nations. He was a founding member of Amnesty International and its Chairman, and he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1974. She died on 27 April 1953 in Clonskeagh, Ireland, aged 86. Link to Wikipedia biography