Eva Gore-Booth (1870–1926)

Eva Gore-Booth was born into a life of privilege as the daughter of Sir Henry Gore-Booth of Lissadell House in County Sligo and his wife Lady Georgina Hill. Her older sister Constance became Countess Markievicz. They were members of the Irish Protestant elite known as the Ascendancy. W.B. Yeats was a friend of the family and recognized Eva's talent as a poet. He remembered the sisters in a two-stanza poem, In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markiewicz as, "Two girls in silk kimonos, both beautiful, one a gazelle." In 1895, Eva became seriously ill and while convalescing in Italy the following year, she met Esther Roper, a suffragist and political activist. They spent the rest of their lives together although it's not known whether they were lovers. Together they spent years helping female factory workers in Lancashire organize and fight for better working conditions. They organized the North of England Society for Woman’s Suffrage and founded the Manchester and Salford Women’s Trade Union Council. Eva served as editor of the quarterly Woman’s Labour News, which ran for four years. In the aftermath of the 1916 Easter Rising, she was instrumental in the campaign to secure the reprieve of her sister, who had been sentenced to death. As Eva grew older, her health declined, and she and Esther retired to London. She was the author of nine books of poetry, seven plays, and several collections of spiritual essays and studies of the Gospels, as well as many pamphlets and essays on the political issues of her day. Shortly before she died, she worked with Irene Clyde and Esther on a privately-circulated magazine called Urania, which expressed their views on gender and sexuality.