Countess Markievicz

Early Life

She was born Constance Gore-Booth on the 4th February 1868 in London. Her parents were Sir Henry Gore-Booth, an explorer and Lady Georgina, an English woman. Her father was an Anglo-Irish protestant landowner. The Gore-Booths were a wealthy family who owned the large estate of Lissadell in north Co. Sligo.

The Gore-Booths had a tradition of caring for their tenants. During the famine of 1879 they provided free food for their tenants, this was very unusual among the landlords at this time. From a young age Constance was aware of poverty and taught to show a deep concern for the poor.

At nineteen years of age Constance went to London as a debutante and was presented at the court of Queen Victoria. She was talented at art and in 1893 she went to study art at the Slade School in London.

Early Politics

In the meantime her sister Eva met an English woman, Esther Roper in Italy. Esther Roper influenced her to become involved in the labour movement in England and women’s suffrage. Eva soon passed this interest in woman’s suffrage on to Constance. The two sisters launched a suffragette campaign in Sligo. Although Constance fundraised for the cause she was not to dedicate too much time to it.

Art and Marriage

In 1898 she went on to study in the Julian School in Paris. It was while she was here that she met Count Casimir Dunin Markievicz, her future husband.

A widower with a young son the Polish Count married her in 1900 in London. They had a daughter Maeve who was born in Sligo.

In 1903 they moved to Dublin with Casimir’s son Stanislaus and Maeve. Countess Markievicz soon earned a reputation as a landscape artist. In 1905 she founded and funded the United Artists Club.

Nationalist Ideas

In 1906 Markievicz rented a small cottage in the Dublin countryside. This cottage had been previously owned by the poet Pádraic Colum. He had left behind the revolutionary publications ‘the Peasant and Sinn Fein’. Markievicz read these and became...