Clodagh Finn: Please stop calling Maud Gonne ‘Yeats’ muse’

The release this week of early RTÉ radio recordings will focus attention on a young woman, accustomed to the high life, who turned her back on parties and balls in Dublin after witnessing evictions during the Land War of the late 19th century. It’s fascinating to hear a 79-year-old Maud Gonne describe, in a dreamy, lilting voice, how her younger self became politicised.

Being adventurous, she got on her horse and rode around the country to witness the evictions being carried out by the Royal Irish Constabulary and the military. She saw a baby being born in a ditch in Limerick in 1886, she said, and she witnessed 1,000 people being evicted in Donegal in a single week.

“I didn’t want to go to balls and parties anymore for I would have had to dance and eat with the evictors,” she told Dr Eileen Dixon in an interview in December 1945. It is one of over 5,000 early audio files, on a variety of subjects, that are now available online thanks to RTÉ Archives.

Maud Gonne was 20 years old when she became aware of the Land War in Ireland. She had just returned from eight years on the continent where, she said, she had been reading and writing, acquiring foreign languages and — the best bit — doing “so little arithmetic that any of my grandchildren at the age of ten would be able to stump me in it”.

Born into privilege in Surrey, England, in 1866, she lived her extraordinary life between England, Ireland and France. And shortly after her political awakening, she was on her way back to Paris after narrowly escaping arrest for attempting to stop evictions here.

The chapter of her life that followed is, perhaps, one of the least aired in the myth that has since grown up around the ‘Joan of Arc of Irish nationalism’. 

She began a relationship with Lucien Millevoye, a married right-wing politician and journalist with whom she had two children, Georges and Iseult.

Her independent wealth and her location — liberal Paris — meant she could keep her children, although she could not acknowledge their existence in Ireland. When her son died in 1891, possibly of meningitis, she told WB Yeats in a letter that an “adopted child” had died.

It was a devastating blow.

Her interest in political affairs continued, although her take on French politics was at complete odds with the woman who fought for the dispossessed in Ireland. When the Dreyfus affair rocked France towards the end of the 19th-century, she followed Millevoye’s anti-semitic lead and condemned the innocent man at the centre of the scandal.

Captain Alfred Dreyfus was a Jewish captain in the French army who was convicted of espionage he didn’t commit. He was later exonerated, but Maud Gonne wrote in a United Irishman column that the liberation of the “traitor Dreyfus” was the last stroke… “no French institution is now safe from the domination of the agents of the synagogue”.

That is a side of the story that doesn’t fit into the narrative we have constructed around a woman who founded the Inghinidhe na hÉireann (Daughters of Ireland) in 1900, a radical feminist organisation that supported independence, Irish manufacture, women’s suffrage and free meals in schools.

But then, the business of building heroes is fraught as author Kim Bendheim found when she went to write a biography of Maud Gonne, a woman she had long admired. Indeed, she almost abandoned the project: “I had uncovered complicated shadows to this woman’s life — her deep-rooted, irrational antisemitism, her constant fabrications and embellishments, her absentee motherhood of her own children. It has been hard to like her.”

Thankfully, she went ahead anyway. The Fascination of What’s Difficult. A Life of Maud Gonne, published in 2021, provides a portrait of Maud Gonne in the round. It shows us that it is possible to help out in soup kitchens during the Dublin Lockout of 1913, but also hold abhorrent antisemitic views.

Then, as now, people — even celebrated political and cultural figures — were capable of holding contradictory views. People, even the ones we put on plinths, are complicated, difficult, and nuanced.

Even in her lifetime, Maud Gonne experienced the glory of public approval, but also the painful sting when it was withdrawn. She married Major John MacBride in 1903 against the advice of friends, including Arthur Griffith and, unsurprisingly, WB Yeats.

A son, Seán, was born in Paris in 1904, but soon afterwards the marriage started to come apart. Maud Gonne filed for divorce, amid claims of cruelty, child abuse, drunkenness and infidelity. The break-up was, to quote one commentator, “remarkably bitter” and ended with a legal separation granted by a French court in 1906.

Maud Gonne, the separated woman, was a step too far for Irish audiences. They had once embraced her when she played Cathleen Ni Houlihan, the embodiment of Ireland, in 1902, but they hissed, in 1906, when she again appeared on the Abbey Theatre.

And yes, we must also acknowledge her relationship with Yeats. They were friends and then something more for a short time. Every schoolchild in Ireland is familiar with the unrequited love story and the many poems that flowed from that.

When Yeats met her first in 1889, he found her not only very handsome but very clever. He also wrote this intriguing line in a letter to John O’Leary: “She is very Irish, a kind of ‘Diana of the Crossways’. Her pet monkey was making, much of the time, little melancholy cries at the hearthrug … It was you, was it not, who converted Miss Gonne to her Irish opinions? She herself will make many converts.”

Forgive me for being distracted by the mention of a pet monkey, but the more you delve, the more you learn about a fascinating, if flawed and, it should never be minimised, anti-semitic woman who has been done such a disservice by being referred to as Yeats’ muse.

Isn’t it time we freed Maud Gonne from that strait-jacketing label?