by Charlie McEvoy
Two sisters sit as if in a picture book: their corseted waists impossibly curved, their porcelain skin delicately draped with chiffon bouquets, and tuffs of fluffy brown hair lay light shadows over their mutually tender gaze.
Next, a bright-young-thing rests over her coffee — oblivious to the cigarette ash that might fall in; her long linen gown is but one more effect of the bohemian artist’s studio.
Finally, a marriage. Attending a ball alongside British royalty, two women flank a gentleman as they pose for their portrait. The taller of the two grasps the gentleman, her husband, by the arm. Her hands are clothed in white silk, her gown cradles several strings of pearls, her upswept hair is nestled against her tiara. Soon a decade will pass and this woman will be imprisoned — a traitor to the English crown; a hero to Ireland.
These images tell the life of Countess Markievicz — Commander of the 1916 Easter Rising, first female MP in Great Britain and Ireland. Yet, the images I have presented above, are alien to her prevailing legacy. She is an omnipresent force in Ireland’s national story. A self-styled Joan of Arc,for many she is the singular woman in the pantheon of Irish history.
A far cry from these images of femininity and wealth, history almost always shows her as hard, militant, and stoic. Dressed in soldier’s uniform, Markievicz ‘left her jewels in the bank and bought a revolver’. She was a woman ‘who forfeited the privileges of her sex’ or, in the thinly veiled misogyny of De Valera, was ‘a strange figure following a path of her own’. If she had a feminine side, it was only as mother to the nation. The woman who ran soup kitchens during the 1913 Lockout; a boy-scout leader, with unrelenting compassion for those poor ‘plain people’. Between the push and pull of her achievements, her gender, and the exigences of political propaganda, she, as an individual, is lost.
Markievicz was a feminist, a socialist, an anti-Imperialist, an artist, a revolutionary. It may sound like a mouth-full, but all of her identities must be read together. While its easy to think of early European feminists as insular, privileged aristocrats — and she did have her time in the Temperance Movement — Markievicz was truly intersectional at a time when almost nobody else understood her aims. She was a romantic Nationalist, prepared to sacrifice her life for her cause. Yet, she believed Irish independence could not exist without the emancipation of women and the working classes. In her prison letters, she imagined Ireland as a beautiful woman, that ‘dark Rosaleen’, whose ‘divorce will I think be granted’. Although the women’s wing of the paramilitary movement, Cumann na mBan has too reached iconic status, Markievicz rejected the idea that women need to be auxiliary to men, instead joining the Marxist Irish Citizen Army.
Markievicz’ beliefs stemmed from the breadth of her experience. Born Lady Constance Gore-Booth in 1868, she was from birth a member of the Protestant Ascendancy. Whilst her brother went to Eton, she lobbied her parents to attend the Slade School of Fine Art in London — her ‘centre of the Universe!’ At twenty-two, she made her way to Paris to study in the Académie Julian, where Count Casmir de Markievicz was doing the same. Russian, Polish or Ukrainian depending on the situation, Casmir like Constance was a member of the aristocracy, whose family represented a foreign ruling class in the land they called home. His sympathies with Polish nationalism came to colour her own view of Ireland, but for the meantime, she wrote her brother: ‘[I] am very happy but wish he was English because of you all’. Whilst her words speak to the pressures of class, gender, and property, Constance was very happy — running around the dimly lit streets of Paris in outrageous costume, playing bourgeois dilettante on Casmir’s estate, dressing up as a Ukrainian peasant like a Russian Marie Antoinette.
Only upon leaving Europe did Constance step into the fray — at first, taking up her place in Dublin Castle Society, then being pulled into activism by her suffragist sister, Eva, and the avant-garde of the Celtic Revival. She and Casmir sent their daughter to live with relatives in that typically distant Edwardian way, and leapt into a world of politics and drama. Enamoured with Yeat’s Cathleen Ni Houlihan (1902), the art and romance of ‘Irishness’ kindled in Markievicz a utopian, egalitarian nationalism all of her own. She increasingly moved within the circles of the radical republican movement — Inghinidhe na hÉireann, Sinn Féin, the Socialist Party — before creating her own: Fianna Éireann.
The Fianna was a militant boys-scout group that sought to radicalise and train its members into ‘the nucleus of a National Volunteer Army’. While critics have not untruthfully called the Fianna ‘child soldiers’, Markievicz never questioned her involvement. It became a platform for her own philosophy, using it to legitimate women’s contributions to the Republican struggle, and led her into the Irish Volunteers and ultimately, rebellion.
The Easter Rising was a romantically doomed revolution, staged in the quagmire of Dublin’s urban slums in April 1916. Underarmed, devoid of experience, Markievicz, her Fianna, and one thousand others proclaimed an Irish Republic. Lasting six days, one thousand, mostly civilians, died. Only one death – that of a policeman – was ever linked back to Markievicz, though she denied it. The rebel leaders surrendered and were executed. Markievicz was spared ‘purely on the grounds of her sex’ and her next five years were spent shuffling around British prisons, spluttering watercolours and cigarette butts around her cell and amusingly signing letters ‘Con(vict) 12’.
When she finally emerged, the War of Independence had passed and a treaty was signed, making Ireland part of the Commonwealth — but Markievicz rejected it. She believed collaboration with the Empire would only subsume Ireland’s interests, perpetuate injustice, and legitimate British oppression. She asked how Ireland could swear an oath to the Emperor of India, oppressor of Egypt, and still think itself free. Markievicz joined with De Valera to found the anti-treaty party, Fianna Fáil. Yet, in doing so she ultimately subsumed her own interests into the politics of an arrogant, totalitarian nationalism, devoid of the feminist, egalitarian principles, which coloured her life.
With Fianna Fáil organising against the Free State, Ireland broke out into a bitter civil war that impressed its bloody legacy upon the Republic and terrorised the North for decades to come. Captured by pro-treaty forces, Markievicz emerged from prison for the final time at the close of 1923. Gaunt, weary, and aged, Casmir had long left for Poland, and she desperately tried to reconcile with her daughter, of whom she knew so little. Alienated from the class and family into which she was born, Constance had little of the means she enjoyed in her days as a society flâneur. Following the death of her sister and eternal confidant, Markievicz seemed to increasingly acquiesce to the conservative consensus of Catholic Ireland. Dreams of ‘a Cooperative Commonwealth of Gaelic ideals’ were swept-up and laid adrift by the ceaseless tides of change. Constance herself became, in the words of biographer Lauren Arrington: ‘a relic of a quickly receding past.’ In 1927, she died in the public ward of a Dublin hospital, aged 59.
Who Countess Markievicz is depends so much on who we want her to be. Whether spliced through tourist shops on the ring of Kerry or brushed across the walls of Belfast, her image represents all that Ireland was — and all it hopes to be. Seen for decades as a ‘chocolate box heroine’, recent works have reevaluated the radicalism of Markievicz’ actions. Markievicz was deeply absorbed in the currents of her time. She lived a life so extraordinarily different from that which was imagined for her, but it was her life – the life of Lady Constance Gore Booth – all the same. She approached art and politics with a romanticism accessible to a woman of her time; she learnt statecraft off the cuff, sparsely supplementing her female education; and to the chagrin of many a simplistic biographer, ordered fur coats to Holloway prison and insisted on cropping her hair, in step with twenties trends. The allure of the ‘rebel countess’ legend lies on the assumption that there existed within Markievicz an inherent contradiction — an irreconcilable difference between gender and politics, class and action. Her legacy is not a testament however to some ethereal exceptionalism that defies the essential nature of a landed woman — a view that baffles Markievicz’ own beliefs — but her absolute willingness, in the face of uncertainty to sacrifice all of the few privileges afforded to her to a romantic martyrdom — a supreme belief in the intersections of freedom.
Further Reading
Arrington, Lauren. Revolutionary Lives: Constance and Casmir Markievicz. Princeton University Press, 2016.
Clarke, Mollie. ‘’The Making of a Rebel Countess.’’ The National Archives Blog. [Accessed: 20 August 2023] https://blog.nationalarchives.gov.uk/constance-markievicz-the-making-of-a-rebel-countess/.
McCoole, Sinéad. No Ordinary Women: Irish Female Activists in the Revolutionary Years 1900–23. University of Wisconsin Press, 2003.
Naughton, Lindie (ed). Markievicz: Prison Letters and Rebel Writings. Merrion Press, 2018.
Image References
Figure 1. The Gore-Booth sisters, Constance and Eva, circa 1895. Sligo County Library.
Figure 2. Constance Gore-Booth and Althea Gyles in London, circa 1893. Public Record Office of Northern Ireland.
Figure 3. Casimir and Constance Markievicz with Constance’s cousin Madeline Wynne, at a Dublin Castle Ball, St. Patrick’s Day, 1908. Public Record Office of Northern Ireland.
Figure 4. Constance Markievicz, Anti-Treaty Cartoon, 1922. National Library of Ireland.
Cover Image. Studio portrait of Constance Markievicz in uniform with a revolver. Circa 1915. National Library of Ireland.
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