Maud Gonne

She was one of the most flamboyant personalities of the Irish War of Independence: Maud Gonne, tall, glamorous and headstrong. She was born the daughter of an English officer in 1866 – and as much as she loved Ireland, she hated the British Empire. To the disenfranchised, she was the »woman of the fairies« who worked miracles; to her enemies, she was an »uncontrollable revolutionary«.

Maude Gonne fought on the side of the tenant farmers against the landlords’ troops, fought for Republican prisoners, went to prison herself and founded the first political women’s organization in Ireland. Prominently and loudly, she challenged colonial power and risked taking a bullet or a blow with the butt of a firearm at any given moment. She also was the great love of the poet and Nobel Prize winner W. B. Yeats – all the while leading a secret double life in Paris as the mistress of a right-wing politician and mother of a capricious daughter. Her late marriage to an Irish hero was a fiasco, but her combative spirit remained unbroken. 100 years after the Easter Rising, the beacon of Irish independence, Maud Gonne still is an iconic figure of mental and militant resistance. In a vivid and entertaining way, Elsemarie Maletzke recounts the story of the beautiful officer’s daughter turned revolutionary who was to become »Ireland’s Joan of Arc«.

Maud Gonne, born December 21st, 1866 near Farnham, Surrey, devoted her life to the Irish War of Independence. She was muse and lifelong love of Nobel Prize laureate William Butler Yeats. In 1903, she married the Irish republican John MacBride. Their son, Seán MacBride, is the founder of Amnesty International and recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. Maud Gonne died on April 27th, 1953 in Dublin.

»Maybe the most beautiful thing about this book: it celebrates life in all its absurd contrariness.« Susanne Mayer, Die ZEIT

»Elsemarie Maletzke accomplishes a fascinating split between a detailed historical retrospect on a dramatic, turbulent era and the psychological study of a fanatic fighter for justice, whose political blindness precluded any possibility for compromises.« Peter Münder, NZZ

»a great biography on the inconvincible Maud Gonne« Wieland Freund, Die Welt