Eva Gore-Booth
Eva Gore-Booth was an influential Anglo-Irish poet, suffragist, and social activist born into a wealthy landowning family. Despite her privileged upbringing, she developed a strong sense of social and spiritual awareness, particularly influenced by the death of her grandmother. Throughout her life, she demonstrated a commitment to social justice, notably by supporting female laborers and advocating for women's rights, which included her role in the Manchester Trade Union Council. Gore-Booth’s literary work often reflected her egalitarian values and spiritual explorations. She formed a lifelong partnership with fellow suffragist Esther Roper, and their shared activism included efforts for pacifism, especially during World War I. Unlike her sister, Constance Gore-Booth, who engaged in more militant political actions, Eva embraced a philosophy of non-violence. In her later years, she focused on mystical poetry and spiritual matters, culminating in the private publication of her magazine, Urania, which expressed her vision for transcending traditional gender roles. Despite struggling with health issues, including asthma and cancer, Gore-Booth’s legacy continues to resonate in discussions on women's rights and social reform.
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Subject Terms
Eva Gore-Booth
Poet
- Born: May 22, 1870
- Birthplace: Lissadell, County Sligo, Ireland
- Died: June 30, 1928
- Place of death: Hampstead, London, England
Biography
The daughter of Anglo-Irish landowners, Eva Gore-Booth led a privileged childhood that was nonetheless marked by spiritual and social awareness. Her spiritual awareness grew out of the death of her grandmother, Lady Hill, when Gore-Booth was nine years old, an event that resulted in Gore-Booth’s lifelong devotion to spiritual matters. Although the family estate in Sligo covered an enormous twenty-five thousand acres, Gore-Booth and her sister were brought up to respect the tenants, to whom the girls distributed food during the 1879 famine.
In 1894 Gore-Booth traveled with her father to the West Indies and North America, and with her mother she traveled to Germany and Italy. In Venice, she developed asthma and consumption, conditions that would plague her the remainder of her life. Doctors told her to spend more of her time near the Mediterranean, and in 1896 she returned to Italy, where she met suffragist Esther Roper, who would become her lifelong companion. In 1900, not expecting to live much longer, Gore-Booth wrote a will in which she left everything to Roper. Gore-Booth lived another two-and-a-half decades, however, and she used this time not only to write but to organize female laborers and to work for the suffragist cause and for pacifism. In 1898, she moved from the family estate to a row house in Manchester that she shared with Roper.
The following year, Gore-Booth became a prime mover in the Manchester Trade Union Council, an organization that would spawn nearly forty other unions for female workers. Throughout this time, Gore-Booth continued to produce poetry and plays that spoke to her egalitarian interests. Unlike her sister, the Countess Markievicz, who was sentenced to life imprisonment for her support of the violent Sinn Fein home rule movement, Gore-Booth embraced pacifism. Her support for conscientious objectors during World War I damaged Gore-Booth’s always-precarious health, and in the final six years of her life she returned to largely spiritual matters, devoting herself to mystical poetry and to a lengthy exposition of the Fourth Gospel. Shortly before succumbing to intestinal cancer, however, she privately published a magazine called Urania in which she asked a rhetorical question that addressed and unified her seemingly disparate concerns: “There is a vista before us of a Spiritual progress which far transcends all political matters. It is the abolition of the ’manly’ and the ’womanly.’ Will you not help to sweep them into the museum of antiques?”