If ever there was a case of a favourite chapter in this book, I would choose chapter 2, Lucy McDiarmid’s ‘Comradeship’ on the imprisonment in Holloway prison of Kathleen Clarke and her two ‘tall’ comrades, Constance Markievicz and Maud Gonne, who at times tended to dispute ‘as to which of them had the highest social status’. Continue reading
What is most striking to me about the pre-Rising Irish middle-class is its freewheeling bohemian character: romantic advanced nationalism provided many fora (meetings, dance-floors, remote country language camps, amateur and professional theatrical stages, communist communes) for debating and living secularism, feminism, suffragism, even vegetarianism and lesbianism. Continue reading
Tinteán 