By Lucas Spiro
“What happens when you discover your heroine was a vile anti-Semite?”
The Fascination of What’s Difficult: A Life of Maud Gonne by Kim Bendheim. Or Books, pages, $22 (paperback).
There is a tendency in popular Irish historicism to favor the myth. Difficult parts of the past are often swept under the rug so the “official” story can be marketed. The air-brushing is a by-product of the nationalist meat-grinder. The chronicle of how an oppressed colony becomes an independent nation-state is a sympathetic saga, its venerable underdogs practically canonized. The authorized version inevitably obscures the preceding chaos, tangled fallout, and intricacies of Ireland&#;s political transformation. Complex figures are flattened, stripped of their vital humanity.
In her first book, The Fascination of What’s Difficult: A Life of Maud Gonne, Kim Bendheim does not shy away from complication. In fact, she embraces it in a succinct but richly detailed critical biography of one of Ireland’s most celebrated and enigmatic political and cultural figures. The result is a compelling study of a woman who for too long has been perceived as otherworldly, despite the fact tha
Maud Gonne ( - )
Irish Revolutionary, Patriot, Suffragette & founder of Inghinidhe na hÉireann
Maud Gonne, the eldest of two daughters, was born on December 20, , to Thomas Gonne and Edith Frith Gonne, nee Cook, in the village of Tongham in Surrey in England. At the time of her birth her father, Thomas, was a British army officer stationed at the Aldershot military garrison, located close to the village of Tongham. Her mother, Edith, was a member of a wealthy textile manufacturing family with a transgenerational history of government and military service.
In , when Maud’s father's regiment was transferred to the Curragh army base in Co. Kildare, to quell ongoing Fenian activity and prevent another Rising, the family followed, taking up residence in Donnybrook, a suburb of Dublin city.
When Maud was six years of age her mother contacted tuberculosis. Before she could be moved to Italy, where it was believed the dry air would help in her re
Ireland's heroine who had sex in her baby's tomb
Yeats was immediately overwhelmed. According to his biographer R F Foster, Maud Gonne appeared to Yeats "majestic, unearthly… Immensely tall, bronze-haired, with a strong profile and beautiful skin, she was a fin-de-siecle beauty in Valkyrie mode".
It was the start of a mutually obsessive relationship that would last half a century. But what Yeats did not discover until very much later was that less than three weeks before this momentous first encounter, Maud Gonne had given birth to a baby boy.
The baby was called Georges, he was born in Paris, and he was Lucien Millevoye's.
Gonne - a complicated character if ever there was one - initially kept Georges' existence secret from Yeats. When he did find out about the baby, she insisted that he was not hers but adopted.
"It is surprising how naive Yeats seems to have been over Gonne's child," Toomey says. "He must have wanted to believe that what she said was true about it not being hers."
But two-and-a-half years later Georges was dead. It is not certain how he died, but it was probably meningitis.
When Yeats met Gonne ne
Maud Gonne ()
Life
| [usu. Maud Gonne [not Mrs. Gonne], later freq. Madame MacBride;] b. 21 Dec., , at Tongham, nr. Aldershot, dg. of Thomas Gonne, army officer descended from a Tipperary planter family, afterwards London wine-merchants; her mother was mother Edith Frith née Cooke (d), being dg. William Cooke an Englishman whose father William made a large fortune in wholesale merchandising [drapery] in Norfolk; her father was first posted to India and afterwards appt. Brig-Major at Curragh Camp, [var. ]; later appt. to command of 17th Lancers in England; the Gonnes lived variously at Athgarvan Hse (Curragh), Floraville (Eglinton Rd., Donnybrook), and a favourite house in Howth; after his appt. to the Lancers, Maud was ed. by governesses and in Provence; Col. Gonne appt. Dep. Adj. General in Dublin, ; presented to the Viceroy in Dublin Castle [court], ; suffered the death of her father from typhus, ; in France; acts as hostess to her father in Dublin from to his death in [var. ], by which time he had agreed to support her in her struggle for Home Rule as a result of the Land League movement (&#;the people have a right to the land&#;); |
settled with an disli
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