Constance Markievicz's fight for a free Ireland

In 1916, the countess took up arms in a bid to rid Ireland of British rule, and later made political history as the first woman to win a seat at Westminster. But what shaped Constance Markievicz's beliefs?

- JONNY WILKES

There wasn't much in her youth to suggest that Constance Georgine Gore-Booth would fit the role of a nationalist, socialist revolutionary willing to take up arms and face numerous spells in prison, and so be remembered as the Irish heroine and political pioneer Constance Markievicz. Born on 4 February 1868 into Anglo-Irish aristocracy, hers was an upbringing of privilege and high society, either in London or at the family estate of Lissadell in County Sligo. Before she was 20, she would be presented at court to Queen Victoria herself.

Yet Constance grew up socially conscientious and aware of the plight of the working classes. When a famine struck in 1879, she saw her landowning father, the Arctic explorer Sir Henry Gore-Booth, provide his staff and tenants with free food; an inspiring deed both for Constance and her sister Eva, a future suffragist. Constance looked to go a similar way: in 1893, while studying art in London, she joined the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies.

Continuing her studies in Paris, she met a Polish count named Casimir Dunin Markievicz. The pair married in 1900, had a daughter (Constance would also help raise Casimir's son from a previous marriage), and moved to Dublin in 1903. There, they threw themselves into the artistic world, and, increasingly for Countess Markievicz, the political one, too.

FIGHTING ON THE FRONTLINE