On our second trip to Ireland, my husband John and I were visiting a Dublin bookstore where I found a history book which mentioned Constance Gore-Booth Markiewicz, noted Anglo-Irish aristocrat and heroine. Her story as a courageous participant in the early twentieth century battle for Irish independence intrigued me as I am the grandniece of Patrick Joseph Clarke, an emigrant from County Leitrim and founder of the well-known Irish saloon in Manhattan, P. J. Clarke’s. I describe his bar in my family memoir, Over P. J. Clarke’s Bar: New York’s Famous Saloon, published by W. W. Norton. Uncle P. J. hung photographs of several male Irish rebels over his mahogany bar. After studying Constance’s life, I wished that my granduncle had hung her photo there as well.
A few years passed and I participated in a journaling seminar at a retreat house in California where we were asked to write about someone we admired. After I spoke about Constance Markiewicz, one of the seminar members invited me to her room to discuss more of Constance’s impressive life. She suggested that I write an historical novel featuring Constance. None existed. Then, this woman reached for a flask of Irish whiskey in her suitcase and we toasted to that writing endeavor as the nuns at the retreat house rang the bell for prayer.
Returning to my home in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where I taught both college-level English composition and sociology courses, based largely on criminal justice issues, I began gathering biographies about Constance.
One of her biographers, Jacqueline Van Voris wrote:
Although she was always, in a sense, second in command, an instrumental but not a determining figure in Irish politics, she was bound into the rebellion by connections with art, literature, theatre, labor, suffrage, and youth movements. Consequently, she is one of the best representatives of the whole course of rebellion. She is also a representative of the class and circumstances which made rebellion necessary.
I also investigated the history of Lissadell House in County Sligo where Constance lived until she moved to Paris in the late 1890s. In that avant-garde city, she met her future husband Casimir Markiewicz, a Polish count and portrait painter who was making his way in the art world under the mentorship of the Impressionist school of artists. Both of them were rebels. Casi disappointed his landed gentry family in Ukraine when he dropped out of law school to pursue art. Constance barely received permission from her Anglo-Irish parents, Lord and Lady Henry Gore-Booth, to attend art school in Paris and, when she became engaged to Casi, they were not thrilled to have a Polish Catholic artist as a perspective son-in-law.
Constance alienated herself from her Gore-Booth relatives when, after moving to Dublin as Casi’s wife, she became a member of James Connolly’s Irish Socialist party, as well as the Sinn Fein nationalist group, whose slogan, “Ourselves Alone,” marked their dedication to Irish independence from Great Britain. Her life became even more dramatic when she participated in the 1916 Easter rebellion against Great Britain and was almost executed for her treasonous activity. Given a life sentence which was later reprieved, Constance left her English prison cell and returned to Ireland to fight for independence.
During the Anglo-Irish war, Markiewicz served four more prison sentences. This part of her life also intrigued me because I had written about the American prison system. In 2022, Routledge Press in London published my interdisciplinary college text, The American Prison System: Transparency as a Pathway to Correctional Reform. This book is partly based on my experience as a doctoral student in the humanities department at the University of Texas at Dallas where I researched a 1980s Texas landmark prisoner lawsuit, Ruiz v Estelle. During my studies, I became aware of the role which prisoners of conscience play. Constance was among this group of brave political prisoners and her actions and those of other famous resisters are described in one of the text chapters.
I am not a natural fiction-writer and, although I did take courses in creative writing while attending the University of Texas at Dallas, it was a challenge to master the fictional method of “Show, don’t tell.” When one of my English department colleagues at the Santa Fe Community College read my first attempt, she called out, “This is an outline!” I worked under Miriam’s guidance and she said I was on a learning curve. I turned for more help from Vanessa O’Loughlin’s Writing. ie. and one of her editors helped me improve the structure of Leaving Lissadell. I was also fortunate to be the mother of Tom Molanphy, an experienced writer and my best teacher of “Show, don’t tell.”
During our first trip to Ireland in l970, my husband John and I visited my grandaunt Alice who was living near Miltown Malbay in County Clare. That visit was so memorable that I developed a character, Alice McMahon Donovan, based loosely on my Irish relative. Alice became Constance’s maid at Lissadell House and her supporter in later years. She and her daughter Kate interact with the other important historical figure in the novel, Maud Gonne, who was the muse of poet, William Butler Yeats.
For a number of months, I pursued publishers in Ireland. While I did receive a publisher’s compliment that Leaving Lissadell showed hard work and good research, as well as an editor’s praise that the pace of the book was good, I had no luck receiving an offer from any publisher. I made the decision to self-publish through Adrian White at Writing.ie because I want Constance Markiewicz’s life to be known and cherished by more people. I was encouraged when I read that actress Saoirse Ronan expressed her desire to portray Constance on the screen. If some talented screenwriter engages in this endeavor, Constance would come to the attention of movie-going people. There is much about Constance’s life that rings true for today’s world, including her love of nature and women’s equality, her heroic fight for freedom and justice, and her abhorrence of empires.
(c) Helen Clarke Molanphy
About Leaving Lissadell:
Leaving Lissadell, an historical novel, celebrates the remarkable life of Constance Gore-Booth Markiewicz, renowned for her dedication to Irish independence and for the restructuring of Irish society along egalitarian lines. Constance, along with her Anglo-Irish family and her husband’s Polish family, lived during a period when classism, sexism, and imperialism were being challenged.
“Biographies about Constance Gore-Booth Markiewicz tell of her participation in the fight for Irish independence and of her devotion to the Irish people, especially the poor. Now we have an historical fiction version of her amazing life and sacrifice. Leaving Lissadell is also a comprehensive look at Irish history during the period in which Constance lived.”
Mary Mahon, Leitrim, Ireland
Order your copy online here.
