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Overview
Constance Markievicz (1868–1927), born to the privileged Protestant upper class in Ireland, embraced suffrage before scandalously leaving for a bohemian life in London and then Paris. She would become known for her roles as politician and Irish revolutionary nationalist. Her husband, Casimir Dunin Markievicz (1874–1932), a painter, playwright, and theater director, was a Polish noble who would eventually join the Russian imperial army to fight on behalf of Polish freedom during World War I. Revolutionary Lives offers the first dual biography of these two prominent European activists and artists. Tracing the Markieviczes' entwined and impassioned trajectories, biographer Lauren Arrington sheds light on the avant-garde cultures of London, Paris, and Dublin, and the rise of anti-imperialism at the turn of the twentieth century.
Drawing from new archival material, including previously untranslated newspaper articles, Arrington explores the interests and concerns of Europeans invested in suffrage, socialism, and nationhood. Unlike previous works, Arrington's book brings Casimir Markievicz into the foreground of the story and explains how his liberal imperialism and his wife's socialist republicanism arose from shared experiences, even as their politics remained distinct. Arrington also shows how Constance did not convert suddenly to Irish nationalism, but was gradually radicalized by the Irish Revival. Correcting previous depictions of Constance as hero or hysteric, Arrington presents her as a serious thinker influenced by political and cultural contemporaries.
Revolutionary Lives places the exciting biographies of two uniquely creative and political individuals and spouses in the wider context of early twentieth-century European history.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781400874187 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 11/24/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 312 |
| File size: | 5 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Revolutionary Lives
Constance and Casimir Markievicz
By Lauren Arrington
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2016 by Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-16124-2
CHAPTER 1
Origins
THE STUDIO IS CLUTTERED WITH BRUSHES AND EASELS, oils and watercolors. Her own paintings and the work of her friends hang haphazardly on the walls alongside prints torn from folios and tacked-up tapestries. In the corner, a low iron stove heats a kettle. Copper, iron, and enamel pots hang from a shelf that runs along the back. Constance Gore-Booth slouches, smoking: her elbow on the table, the ash of her cigarette hanging precariously over a neglected cup of coffee. The surface is littered with dirty cups and bits of paper. A single candle stuffed into the neck of a wine bottle serves as a centerpiece. Opposite, in high-collared, austere taffeta with leg-of-lamb sleeves, the artist Althea Gyles tilts her chin upward, looking defiantly at the photographer. Constance, wearing a spattered smock thrown carelessly over a shirt, unbuttoned and showing the soft indentation at her clavicle, looks away. A hint of a smile plays across her face. She has made it to London, the place she regarded as "the centre of the Universe!"
Frustrated by a life in "isolation" in County Sligo on the west coast of Ireland, where she met "no people with ideas beyond our own happy little circle," Constance Gore-Booth longed to leave her family's estate, Lissadell, to study at the Slade School of Art. In 1892, at twenty-four years of age, she was anxious to "cut the family tie" and make a life of her own, and she believed that art was the "opening" she needed. She had been born to a sense of adventure; her father, Sir Henry, was an Arctic explorer who was constantly setting sail from Sligo to regions unknown. Both Henry and Constance's mother, Georgina, encouraged their children's interests, giving Constance free rein to pursue her passion and skill in horsemanship and even allowing her to ride with the men in the local hunts. Josslyn, just a year younger than Constance, was sent to school at Eton and treated to expensive private tutors in London before he joined the Royal Munster Fusiliers and settled briefly in Canada, later returning to assume his duties as heir. Eva, two years younger than Constance and also a strong rider, accompanied her father on his travels to the West Indies and the United States and was supplied with endless books on English and German literature, poetry, philosophy, and history. Mabel, born in 1874, and their youngest sibling, Mordaunt, born in 1878, were equally indulged. Riding and painting helped to channel Constance's seemingly boundless energy, but boredom bred mischief. Not long before she left for London, she masterminded the theft of a neighbor's cow and calf and took inordinate delight in hearing the family "call 'Sucky Sucky' on the Sligo road til midnight!" Many anecdotes would circulate after her death about Constance's kindness to the Gore-Booth family's tenants, but her transgression of the boundary between the Big House and the peasant cottage was mostly a matter of fun and would give rise to "enduring jokes about pigs in Irish parlours."
Impatient with the pace of life, Constance was, on the whole, insensitive to her extraordinary privilege. Constance and Eva were sent with their governess on tour to the Continent, where they rowed on the Rhine, heard Wagner at Beyreuth, and studied painting and sculpture in Italy. As a family, the Gore-Booths attended the London season each year, staying at their pied-à-terre, 7 Buckingham Gate, where Constance had been born. In Sligo, Georgina arranged for the best tuition in drawing and painting, with lessons from the Irish painter Sarah Purser, who had recently returned from the Académie Julian in Paris, and from the Swedish artist Anna Nordgren. Georgina commissioned Purser to paint Constance and Eva, then aged twelve and ten, and Purser observed an aptitude and precocity in the elder sister and urged Georgina to cultivate her talent. None of this care and generosity was evident to Constance, who complained in her adolescent diary of her insufferable and "parsimonious family."
The "whirl of excitement" of family theatricals provided some relief from the constraints of daily life, and Constance relished the attention lavished on her at dances at home and in London. Beside a newspaper clipping that praised her "fine style" during the Sligo Harriers' latest hunt, she pasted in her diary a gossipy article about a party given by Lady Jane Lindsay, where "Prince George accompanied his brother, and they both showed considerable discrimination in giving their early dances to Miss Gore-Booth, whose beauty was universally admired." This was the future king against whom she would later demand insurrection. For the present, she thought simply: "What Vulgar People the Royalties must be — This is the conclusion I come to after going to the Victorian Exhibition — NO taste in anything & every family event birth & marriage being celebrated by an awful Daub by an incompetent painter."
Seven years after Constance was presented at court during Queen Victoria's golden jubilee, she had yet to meet her match. At first she had longed for a lover — "even a married one" — but now she simply longed for freedom. She had been afraid of disappointment — "So many people begin with great promise, greater hope, & end in nothing but failure & the poor house or improper" — but she finally mustered the courage to make a break and convinced her "arrogant narrow conventional unreasonable mother & soft mild milk & water father" to send her to the Slade.
London was a study in perspective. Constance had been born there and had spent months socializing under close scrutiny, but she could now negotiate the city on her own terms. She lived lavishly at Sloane Terrace on Sloan Square and had no qualms about offering a five-shilling reward should she happen to mislay her sketchbook — compensation that was equal to more than twenty pounds in today's money. Despite her privileged existence, she began to notice the poor and working-class people living around her: catching in hasty lines the figure of a street hawker beside his cart and a young girl selling flowers; stopping to draw a portrait of a man, face shaded by a flat-cap, sitting on the steps of a grand terrace house, holding a baby wrapped in swaddling. The urban environment awakened her to the extreme economic disparity that had been masked by the Gore-Booths' patronage of their tenants in Sligo. Constance was drawn toward the bourgeois, non-Marxist socialism that was fashionable among London's artists, and she attended a lecture by Beatrice Webb on "Trades Unionism & Socialism" at the Essex Hall.
Webb's theories about the organization of labor in London were in part inspired by cooperation, an economic model of which Constance was aware owing to its popularity in Ireland. In 1894 the Eton-and Oxford-educated Sir Horace Plunkett, third son of Lord Dunsany, founded the Irish Agricultural Organisation Society. The IAOS, or the cooperative movement as it was widely known, sought to increase the profits of small farmers by eliminating middlemen and enabling producers to sell their goods directly. Constance's father, Henry, and her brother, Josslyn, established the Drumcliff Creamery Cooperative Agricultural and Dairy Society in 1895; Georgina laid the foundation stone, and Constance and Eva dressed as dairymaids to pose for promotional photographs. The local newspaper, the Sligo Champion, praised the family for its enthusiasm and exertions "to elevate and improve the condition of the Industrial Classes." The Gore-Booths' support for the cooperative movement was an extension of Anglo-Irish patronage, the sense that it was the responsibility of landlords to educate and improve the lives of their tenants. In London Constance was curious about social reform and the lives of others, but she maintained an aristocratic distance.
Constance aspired to her tutor Alphonse Legros's motto, summa ars est celare artem: the highest art conceals the means by which it is achieved. She experimented with portraiture, drawing sketch after sketch of Legros with various permutations of his impressive moustache. In one daring drawing, he reclines across the page dressed in an undershirt and a splendid pair of striped bathing trunks. She was most adept at drawing faces, sensitive to the emotion in a glance, the character of a nose. And, of course, she drew the horses that had been her lifeblood at Lissadell. Her faithful hunter Max bucks and gallops through her sketchbooks, rebellious at being left behind.
One of her closest friends in London was Althea Gyles, "a strange, red-haired girl," whom W. B. Yeats would later depict in his autobiographies as emaciated and neurotic. Gyles was a fellow Irishwoman from a wealthy Waterford family, who had met Yeats through the Theosophical Society in Dublin. She was also a poet, and in one of Constance's sketchbooks, she scribbled a verse that anticipates in its meter and diction the short poem "Sympathy" for which Yeats would later write an introduction. It may have been through Gyles that Constance Gore-Booth first met Yeats. He visited her in June 1893, not long after she arrived at the Slade, while she was staying with friends at 35 Bryanston Square West. They continued to see each other throughout the summer of 1894, and that July he inscribed a copy of his new symbolic drama, The Land of Heart's Desire, to her. Set "in the County of Sligo, and at a remote time," Yeats's play imagines a young countrywoman who neglects the expectations of her mother and the demands of the parish priest in favor of "a vague, mysterious world" where the wind laughs and the white waves dance. Yeats's imagery combines Irish folklore with occultist themes, which resonate heavily with the ideas of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn into which he had been initiated in 1890.
Like Yeats, Althea Gyles had begun her experiments in mysticism with the Theosophical Society, but she had also moved on to the Golden Dawn, which was concerned with magical practice. Gyles collaborated with Yeats on his early volumes of poetry, drawing magically symbolist designs for The Secret Rose (1897), Poems (1899), and The Wind among the Reeds (1899). Yeats encouraged Constance to join the Golden Dawn, and he persuaded a reluctant Moina Mathers — the wife of Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers, who founded the Order — to tell their fortunes. Yeats wrote to Constance:
She at first refused absolutely on the ground that she had ceased to tell them at all except when she was certain that her doing so would do good, but after a moments thought said that if either you or Miss Gyles thought you were at a great crisis of any kind & would promise to consider carefully any advice she gave, she would devine on the matter. She would however only tell the fortune of the one whose affairs were at this crisis. If there fore you write to me that one of you feels it of great importance I will write & tell Mrs Mathers and she will arrange a meeting before she returns to Paris within the week. She is, despite her youth a very advanced Kabalist & always busy & very little of the world so you must grant to her these exacting conditions.
The results of the audience — if it ever came about — were entirely secret.
Yeats visited the Gore-Booths in Sligo at Christmas 1894, ostensibly as part of his project to collect folklore. He bragged to his sister Lily that despite the vogue for the subject among the gentry, "Folk lore was a new experience to them. They had not thought it existed." Constance's childhood sketchbooks bear out Yeats's supposition. She drew pictures of castles and ruins, but they sit in a generic rather than a discernibly Irish landscape and are indistinguishable from her drawings of scenes from Romeo and Juliet and the Odyssey, and the supernatural figures that she drew were mermaids, not fairies. Despite the foreignness of the topic, the Gore-Booths were hospitable to the young Yeats and humored his obsessions. They took him to see their tenants, one of whom "poured out quantities of tales," much to Yeats's delight. On leaving Lissadell, he made sure "They have now got all my books — including a large paper copy of 'The Countess Kathleen.'" He described the Gore-Booths as a "very pleasant, kindly, inflammable family. Ever ready to take up new ideas & new things." While Constance's father, Henry, thought "of nothing but the north pole," her brother Josslyn's politics had made a strong impression: "'theoretically' a homeruler & practically some kind of humanitarian, much troubled by the responsibility of his wealth & almost painfully conscious. ... He is not however particularly clever & has not, I imagine, much will." Yeats was in terrific awe of Constance's grandmother, a Tory who was obsessed with horses, "an invalede" and "mostly invisable" but nonetheless ruling with "an iron claw."
The Gore-Booth matriarch's ghostly presence disguised from Yeats the fact that her husband, Robert, had also dabbled in spiritualism. Robert had held regular séances at Buckingham Gate in London that were led by the talented and tubercular medium Daniel Douglas Home, whose followers also included Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Mark Twain, Leo Tolstoy, and the Empress Eugenie. Home was famous for his spontaneously playing accordion, which would strike up a tune as the lights began to flicker. According to an officer in the local branch of the Royal Irish Constabulary, Samuel Waters, who participated in the séances at Lissadell, for Robert Gore-Booth these were not party tricks but serious psychic experiences. Waters remembered sitting around a table in the dark, the group's fingers touching to make a circle; the table moved, strange taps could be heard, but the replies from the spirits were often "ridiculous, and some absolutely false." When Robert's cousin was murdered during the 1868 election, Robert held séances in an attempt to identify the perpetrator, but of all the names spelled out by the spirits, none were of people who were present at the scene of the crime. This disappointment may have stymied the occultist enthusiasms of Robert's generation at Lissadell, but Constance's parents, Henry and Georgina, were both attracted to the positivistic mysticism that was popular at the end of the century.
Georgina Gore-Booth was a close friend of Frederic Myers, the founder of the Society for Psychical Research. Myers and his colleagues studied spiritual phenomena in an attempt to explain it scientifically and thereby — they hoped — rescue the immaterial world from the overbearing influence of Darwinism. For Henry and Georgina and some of the Gore-Booth siblings, the spirit world replicated the social hierarchies of this world. When a young Mordaunt saw the figure of the hall-boy John Blaney — who had died at his own home that morning — in Lissadell's kitchens, Myers suggested that "something" of or from Blaney had "reverted to well-known haunts," and perhaps "the dead boy waited to manifest until his young master reached a suitable spot."
Constance's and Eva's spiritualism was of a different order. In the 1880s and 1890s socialism and occultism worked as elective affinities; spiritualist utopianism was entwined with a social utopianism in which societal change could be imagined outside of a Marxist economic paradigm. These ideas were typical of the literati who shifted between William Morris's house in Hammersmith and Madame Blavatsky's rooms in Holland Park. Over the course of their lives, the politics of Yeats, Eva, and Constance would sharply diverge: Yeats would turn to Fascism, Constance to Bolshevism, while Eva's gaze would stay fixed on the dream of poets and utopians. Yet in the 1880s they were still very much of the same mind. When Yeats visited Lissadell again in 1895, the weather was freezing, so they arranged a skating party and "made coffey on the shore." Perhaps it was on one of those evenings that, sitting around the fire, he attempted to divine their futures.
Eva's horoscope showed Taurus in the fifth house, confirming her artistic nature. Saturn dominated the first, suggesting that work was central to her identity, and that her concern with responsibility meant that she frequently put others' needs ahead of her own. Uranus in the eighth house also suggested that she was a psychic sensitive. All these characteristics would be borne out through her relentless campaigning for suffrage and working-class women, her devotion to writing esoteric verse, and her telepathic communications with Constance during long years of separation. In drastic contrast to her sister, Constance's ego was ruled by the energy and aggression of Mars. Virgo in the eighth house indicated a compulsive nature, a constrained sexual life — and even susceptibility to abdominal disease. Just as striking is the presence of Uranus in her seventh house, the House of Partnership, which relates to cooperation of the self and society. There, Yeats found sudden upheaval, even revolution.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Revolutionary Lives by Lauren Arrington. Copyright © 2016 by Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
Preface: The Rebel Countess and the Polish Irishman ix1 Origins 1
2 Bohemia 16
3 The Politics of Art 34
4 Suffrage, Nationalism, and the Daughters of Ireland 50
5 Women’s Work? 56
6 Conversion 65
7 Physical Force 75
8 Social Realism 83
9 The Beginning 89
10 The Markieviczes at War 111
11 War and Family Life 138
12 Victory behind Bars 163
13 A Citizen of the Republic 198
14 Counterrevolution 236
15 Reconciliation 252
16 Legacies 264
Selected Bibliography 277
Index 289
What People are Saying About This
"Lauren Arrington's compelling double biography of Constance and Casimir Markievicz is the first book to do full justice to the epic lives of its subjects, European cosmopolitans engaged in art, politics, and revolution. The book's research brings to light such fascinating details as the affectionate, gossipy letters between Constance and her sister Eva Gore-Booth, Casimir's frequent requests for money from his brother-in-law Sir Josslyn, and bitter expressions of neglect by the couple's children, Stanislaus and Maeve. Superb in its mastery of national and personal histories, Revolutionary Lives is required reading for anyone interested in Polish, Irish, or women's studies; it is a requirement that is also a pleasure."—Lucy McDiarmid, author of At Home in the Revolution: What Women Said and Did in 1916"Timely, well researched, and original, Revolutionary Lives contributes much that is new by connecting the life and work of iconic Irish revolutionary Constance Markievicz to that of her husband Casimir—a more obscure figure but not the simple foil that has sometimes been portrayed. This is a book that needed to be written."—R. F. Foster, University of Oxford"There have been a number of biographies about Constance and Casimir Markievicz, but Revolutionary Lives is the first dual biography and marks a valuable addition to the literature. Providing a proper account of Casimir Markievicz's life, the book challenges some of the simplistic views that are currently held. This is a complicated period in history and these are complex lives, but Arrington guides her material with authority."—Maria Luddy, University of Warwick