Collected Works Gore-Booth, Eva: Poems & Plays, V1, 28 May 2015

[doubleshuffle]

I stumbled upon one of Gore-Booth's poems in an anthology, and got interested. Turns out she was not only a seriously good poet, but also a highly interesting person. Here's a nice example of her poetry:

“WHERE GREAT WAVES BREAK”

Far from the downs and the safe farm lands
And the quiet meadows and comforting trees,
And the gladness of men who take their ease,
Where the tide flows over treacherous sands,
Earth fenced about with her sharp rocks stands,
With her waters gathered about her knees,
Where the breaking waves of impossible seas
Build up dream houses not made with hands—
The soil is scant and stubborn and bare,
There is light and to spare and yet not a sound
Save the surge of the wild sea everywhere;
But the grimmest of rocks are folded round
By the glory of moving waters fair,
And where great waves break there is holy ground.

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And here's a bit of biography:

Eva Selina Laura Gore-Booth (22 May 1870 – 30 June 1926) was an Irish poet and dramatist, and a committed suffragist, social worker and labour activist. She was born at Lissadell House, County Sligo, the younger sister of Constance Gore-Booth (4 February 1868 – 15 July 1927), later known as the Countess Markievicz, whose illustrations have been used in this ebook.

Both she and her sister, who later became a prominent Irish revolutionary, reacted against their privileged background and devoted themselves to helping the poor and disadvantaged. In 1895, Gore-Booth became seriously ill with threatened tuberculosis. In the following year, while convalescing in Italy, she met and fell in love with Esther Roper, the Manchester-based secretary of the North of England Society for Women’s Suffrage.
Gore-Booth returned briefly to her home at Lissadell and established a Sligo branch of the Irish Women’s Suffrage and Local Government Association. Within months she rejected her privileged lifestyle and went to live in Manchester with Roper, where the couple had leading roles in the trade union and women’s suffrage movements.

In 1916 Gore-Booth and Roper established a radical journal entitled ‘Urania,’ which expressed their pioneering views of gender and sexuality.
In the aftermath of the 1916 Rising Gore-Booth was instrumental in the campaign to secure the reprieve of her sister who had been sentenced to death for her involvement. Along with Alice Stopford Green she also took part in the unsuccessful campaign for the reprieve of Roger Casement. After World War I, Gore-Booth and Roper became members of the Committee for the Abolition of Capital Punishment and worked for prison reform.

Eva Gore-Booth was also a poet and playwright. Her first published volume was praised by Yeats and G. W. Russell (Æ). While some of her poems deal with her political activism, most are mystical and religious in theme; Gore-Booth was involved in theosophy and became a member of the Theosophical Society after World War I. Her versions of the Irish myths have a decidedly feminist bent, and her 1923 study A Psychological and Poetic Approach to the Study of Christ in the Fourth Gospel is an early example of feminist theology.

As she grew older, Gore-Booth was forced to give up active work but continued writing poetry. Esther Roper took care of her throughout her long illness and they were together at the end. Eva Gore-Booth died in 1926 at her home in Hampstead, London.

(Adapted from Wikipedia, with additional information from the highly recommended biography by Sonja Tiernan: Eva Gore-Booth. An image of such politics, Manchester University Press, 2012.)

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This edition contains the following volumes,

Poems (1898)
Unseen Kings (1904)
The One and The Many (1904)
The Three Resurrections and The Triumph of Maeve (1905)
The Egyptian Pillar (1907)
The Sorrowful Princess (1907)
The Agate Lamp (1912),

as well as those texts from the following two volumes that had not been published in any of the above:

The Perilous Light (1915)
The Death of Fionavar (1916)

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