One of the least known and yet most influential Irish Revolutionaries of her time, was a lady named Maud Gonne.

Born in Aldershot in England in 1865, she was left motherless at the age of 6 and at the young age of seventeen she moved to Dublin Castle to act as her army father’s social hostess.

Four years later, on the death of her father, she and her sister returned to London to live with an uncle, but having contracted what we would today call a “blood clot” on the lung, she was sent to Auvergne in France for recuperation.

There she met a journalist and local politician called Lucien Millevoye and carried on an affair with him until 1989, bearing him two children.

During their time together, she followed his lead in working for Irish Independence, a favorite topic in France at that time, just a century after the French Revolution had brought about such radical changes to the European continent.

Later, Gonne developed an association with the poet W. B. Yeats with whom she formed the “Association Irlandaise de Paris”, although she continuously rejected his many marriage proposals.

At that time, the Irish Republican Brotherhood was an outlawed and secret organization but Gonne flushed it back into public prominence with her many protests against slum landlords and the cruel eviction laws of her day and she managed to attract police and political attention when she vehemently protested the celebration of Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee.

Shortly thereafter, she founded the Daughters of Ireland as part of the Irish Women’s Republican Movement and set about developing opposition to the English recruitment for soldiers to fight in the Boer War.

For a short time, she toyed with acting and actually took the lead role in one of Yeats’ plays about Ireland’s struggle for freedom, then suddenly in Paris in 1903, she married a John Mac Bride who had formed an Irish Brigade to fight on the side of the Boers, but their marriage failed almost immediately and he returned to Ireland to face his destiny of being executed as part of the Easter uprising in 1916.

Maud continued to live in France for a period, then she returned to Dublin where she suffered internment for her “revolutionary” ideas and spent some time in the dreadful Holloway prison in England.

She spent much of her time as an organizer for family relief for republican prisoners and their dependents during the fight for Irish Independence and was finally released from prison in 1923 after maintaining a sustained hunger strike.

Although rarely spoken of today and more rarely recognized as a forthright and strong leader in the fight for Irish Nationalism, Maud Gonne was a celebrity in her day, loved or hated, depending on people’s politics and religious affiliation.

After release from prison, she lived near Dublin in Roebuck House, Clonskeagh, where she died on April 27th 1953.