REMARKABLE WOMAN

Evening Star, Issue 19660, 13 September 1927, Page 9

REMARKABLE WOMAN

SABEER §F "HED COUNTESS ” OKCE SENTEKBED TO DEATH Countess Markievicz, Irish rebel and the first woman eledcd to the British Parliament, died in Dublin a few weeks ago. She was operated upon on .filly 1 in a Dublin hospital for appendicitis, and had a relapse. A second operation was subsequently performed. Mine. Markievicz—she was generally addressed and referred to as “ niadaine was perhaps the most remarkable of the _ extraordinary group of women politicians which was produced by the ferment of tlm Irish war.” She was exceptional in the sense that she not only urged others to violence, but herself set an example. Deceased was sentenced to death in 391 G for taking part in the Easter rebellion in Dublin. The sentence was later commuted, hut her fellow-leaders were shot against a wall. Her crime was that, attired in the green uniform of a male officer of the Sinn Fein organisation, she had commanded 120 rebels in charge of one of the Dublin squares. When called on by the British to surrender she kissed her revolver before handing it to the officer who captured her. ART STUDENT IN PARIS. Constance Markievicz was made up of extraordinary elements. She was the daughter of an old Sligo county family She ran away and became an art student in Paris in days when women did not do that sort of thing. She was a daredevil of the huntingfield, and an absolutely fearless woman of .Amazonian powers of endurance. She fell in love with a Polish artist nobleman during ho' - days in Paris, and they were married in Dublin. Then she nlunged into the Larkin Labor troubles in Dublin. Sbo was arrested for striking a policeman during a Socialist demonstration. The deceased was adored by the poor of Dublin. They were guests in her big house in the Dublin mountains, while she herself was forced to live in poor circumstances in the slants. The count after a time wont hack to I olond and became commercial attache to the \-onrican consulate in Warsaw. At the outbreak of war he enlisted as a trooper in the Russian armv. One of the saddest women to-day is the aged mother of the Countess Markieviez, the Dowager Lady Gore-Booth, widow of the fifth baronet. She it is who has had much of the care and upbringing of Maevc, the countess s young daughter, who was called to her mother’s bedside in a Dublin hosmtal by a, wireless appeal, broadcast in England.

PERILOUS PHASE OF CAREER. It was after her release from prison during the general amnesty that followed the Easter rebellion that ‘the Red Countess,” as she was known, came to a new and still perilous phase of her career. She was one of the many Republican leaders always attacking the Government’s authority and always “on the run.” She was captured and imprisoned more than once. The countess was elected to Westminster in 1018. but never took her seat, and it was left to Aster to become the first active British woman M.T*. To the end she remained a in fbo T)c Valsi’n navt/v ann a niember of the Hail. She died at fifty-one years of a"e.