Five generations at Lissadell
The Gore-Booths
The Gore-Booth family built and held Lissadell from the late 18th century through to 2003. The present house was commissioned by Sir Robert Gore-Booth, 4th Baronet (1805–1876) and built 1830–1835 by Francis Goodwin, a London-based architect best known otherwise for civic buildings in the English Midlands. Sir Robert was the first Lissadell baronet to live in the new house; the family had previously occupied an older house on a nearby site. The Gore-Booths produced soldiers, MPs, polar explorers (Sir Henry Gore-Booth went to Spitsbergen in 1882) and the two revolutionary sisters of the next generation.
1868–1927
Constance
Constance Georgine Markievicz was born in London on the 4th of February 1868 to the Gore-Booth family and raised at Lissadell. She trained as a painter in London and Paris, married the Polish count Casimir Markiewicz, and threw herself into Dublin nationalist politics in the 1900s. She was second-in-command at the College of Surgeons during the Easter Rising in 1916, sentenced to death and commuted because of her sex. In December 1918 she was elected for Sinn Féin in Dublin St Patrick's — the first woman elected to the United Kingdom Parliament — and refused to take the Westminster seat, sitting instead in the First Dáil. She became Minister for Labour in 1919, the first woman cabinet minister in Western Europe. She died in a public ward in Dublin in 1927.
Poet, suffragist, organiser
Eva
Eva Gore-Booth was born at Lissadell in 1870 and lived most of her adult life in Manchester with her partner Esther Roper, organising trade-union work among working-class women — barmaids, pit-brow lasses, circus performers — and writing poetry. She published several collections during her lifetime. Yeats responded to her sympathetic ear by confiding his unrequited love for Maud Gonne. She died in 1926, a year before Constance.
Two long visits, 1894 and 1895
Yeats at Lissadell
Yeats visited Lissadell as a young poet in 1894 and 1895, brought there through family connection — the Pollexfens and Middletons of Sligo town knew the Gore-Booths. He left a lasting record of the place in In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markievicz, published in 1933 after both sisters had died: The light of evening, Lissadell, / Great windows open to the south, / Two girls in silk kimonos, both / Beautiful, one a gazelle. The gazelle is Eva. The other was Constance.