Alice L. Milligan (1865–1953)

Alice Milligan was born to a large, prosperous Methodist family in Gortmore, near Omagh, County Tyrone, in Northern Ireland. She began writing poetry as a child. Her father Seaton Milligan was a businessman who had gained extensive knowledge of local history, archaeology, and antiquities, which he shared with his children. Alice's older Charlotte Milligan Fox grew up to be a well-known collector of folk songs and founder of the Irish Folk Song Society. From 1877 to 1887, Alice attended Methodist College Belfast. With her father, she wrote a political travelogue of the north of Ireland, Glimpses of Erin (1888). Her first novel, A Royal Democrat, was published in 1890. She went to Dublin on a teacher training course in 1891 and was drawn to the cause of Irish independence, becoming an ardent activist and organizer. Back in Belfast, she co-founded branches of the Irish Women's Association and became its first president. With Ethna Carbery, she founded and edited two nationalist journals, The Northern Patriot and the Shan Van Vocht, and wrote and produced plays. As a key figure of the Irish literary revival, she was a close associate of Douglas Hyde, William Butler Yeats, James Connolly, Francis Joseph Bigger, John Bulmer Hobson, Eoin MacNeill, and Roger Casement. In 1904, she became a full-time lecturer with the Gaelic League throughout Ireland and organized Irish-language schools. After Casement was executed by the British for treason, she campaigned for political prisoners and against the partition of Ireland. In 1921, she was forced to flee Dublin because of threats from the IRA due to her brother’s former service in the British Army. She settled in a village near Omagh, where she lived the last 30 years of her life.