Constance and Eve Gore-Booth

GORE-BOOTH FAMILY A photograph showing Eva and Constance Gore-Booth in matching Victorian white dresses with laced bodices and rose bouquets, one wearing armband of Drumcliffe Cooperative Creamery, probably mid to late 1880s, apparently at a garden gate but probably in a studio setting.  A rare and charming photograph, showing what Yeats had in mind when he wrote of his memories of ‘two girls, both beautiful, one a gazelle ..’ Constance Gore-Booth, born 1868 at Lissadell, Co. Sligo, an early friend of W.B. Yeats, trained as an artist in Paris and married the Polish Count Casimir de Markiewicz in 1900. The marriage was not a success, and she later became a political and social activist, joined the Irish Volunteers and fought in the Easter Rising; she was sentenced to death but not executed. She was the first woman elected to the British House of Commons (though she did not take her seat), and the first female Government Minister in Britain or Ireland. She opposed the Treaty, and died in 1927, worn out by a lifetime of political activism. Eamon de Valera was a pallbearer at her funeral. Her sister Eva, born 1870, was a poet, a pacifist, a trades unionist and a suffragette; she lived in Manchester with a woman friend from the 1890s.

Adam’s