Magdalena and I are just back from nearly three weeks of holidays in Ireland. We spent the first two days in Sligo where, among other things, we visited Drumcliff Cemetery, where poet, playwright and Nobel laureate William Butler Yeats is buried, and where his grandfather was rector. We then went on to visit Lissadell House.
The house was built in the 1830s so, as our guide pointed out, it just qualified as Georgian. London architect, Sir Francis Goodwin, designed the house for Sir Robert Gore Booth, 4th baronet, whose family held an estate in the area since the end of the 16th century.
The Gore Booths moved in high circles, and had marital connections even to royalty (the Mountbattens, who also had land in Sligo). Robert’s son, Sir Henry, was a noted Arctic explorer, and two of Henry’s daughters also achieved fame. Eva was a leading figure in the Suffragette movement at the end of the nineteenth century, while her sister married self-styled Polish “Count” and painter Casimir Markievicz, before going on to become a leading figure in the Irish republican movement. She participated in the 1916 Easter rising in Dublin, and was afterwards sentenced to death. The sentence, however, was reprieved, and she was released a year later under an amnesty for prisoners from the rising. She went on to become the first woman to be elected to the House of Parliament, when the republicans used the 1918 election as a mechanism to obtain a political mandate. However, she did not take her seat but, along with the other republicans elected in what was a landslide victory, assembled in the first Irish parliament, or Dáil, in Dublin, in a move to claim Ireland’s status as a sovereign country.
As well as the leaders of the Republican and labour movements, including James Connolly and James Larkin, Constance and Eva knew William Butler Yeats, his brother Jack, the painter, and the artist and playwright George Russell, who signed himself as AE.
I first visited the grounds over forty years ago. At that time, the house was still lived in by two of Constance and Eva’s sisters. The grounds were open but the house was closed to the public, and both were badly in need of restoration. It was bought in 2004 by Edward Walsh and Constance Cassidy, who have undertaken that restoration and opened the principal rooms the public five days a week in the summer months. Paul, our tour guide, was outstanding, taking us though a large collection of family photos and the highlights of the art collection, which includes works by Yeats, Russel and Casimir Markiewicz. There are also exhibitions in the restored coach house, and there is an alpine garden and a walled garden.
I will end with the poem by Yeats about Eva and Constance. Yeats’s admiration of the two girls is tempered by his distaste for the mass movements they espoused (to be fair, his poem September 1913 is a scathing indictment of the Irish business class, who broke a long and bitter general strike in that year).
In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markievicz
BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
The light of evening, Lissadell,
Great windows open to the south,
Two girls in silk kimonos, both
Beautiful, one a gazelle.
But a raving autumn shears
Blossom from the summer's wreath;
The older is condemned to death,
Pardoned, drags out lonely years
Conspiring among the ignorant.
I know not what the younger dreams –
Some vague Utopia – and she seems,
When withered old and skeleton-gaunt,
An image of such politics.
Many a time I think to seek
One or the other out and speak
Of that old Georgian mansion, mix
Pictures of the mind, recall
That table and the talk of youth,
Two girls in silk kimonos, both
Beautiful, one a gazelle.
Dear shadows, now you know it all,
All the folly of a fight
With a common wrong or right.
The innocent and the beautiful
Have no enemy but time;
Arise and bid me strike a match
And strike another till time catch;
Should the conflagration climb,
Run till all the sages know.
We the great gazebo built,
They convicted us of guilt;
Bid me strike a match and blow.
