Actress. She was best remembered for her 30-year long turbulent relationship with the Nobel Prize recipient poet William Butler Yeats. She has been described as a well-educated, tall, red-hair beauty with a rebellious spirit. She was called the "Irish Joan of Arc", yet others called her "Helen of Troy". She was the eldest of two daughters of Captain Thomas Gonne of the British Army's 17th Lancers and Edith Firth Cook, the daughter of a wealthy textile manufacturer. When she was about three-years-old, her family was assigned to a post near a rural Irish fishing village. After her mother died in 1871, she was sent to French boarding schools but had the opportunities, as a teenager, to travel about Europe to meet high society. After her father returned from his tour in India, she returned to Ireland to be with him in 1884. It was then she developed a conviction to fight for "Irish Freedom". The winter of 1886, her father suddenly died leaving his two young daughters independently wealthy. She returned to France where she fell in love with a French politician, Lucien Millevoye; he was much older, married and Anti-British. As a couple, they returned to Ireland to fight for Irish independence. She gave speeches, rallied the Irish and was an influence in decisions and lawmaking of their English overlords. Then on January 30, 1889 while in London, she met the young poet William Butler Yeats, hence began their thirty-year off-and-on romance. He fell in love with her at first glance with a passion that can be read in the lines of his poetry. Unbeknownst to Yeats, just weeks prior to their meeting, she had given birth secretly to Millevoye's son, George. At the age of 19 months, George died. She took the baby's body back to France to be buried in a white mausoleum in a cemetery west of Paris. Overcome with the grief from the loss of George, she became interested, along with Yeats, in reincarnation, the occult, metaphysics, and paranormal activities. She traveled from France, to England, and back to Ireland in pursuit of information of these beliefs. Two years after George's death, she had an erotic encounter with Millevoye beside George's coffin for the purpose of conceiving a baby having George's soul. Yeats' 1893 poem "On a Child's Death" and his autobiography documented her coping with this loss. In August 1894 a daughter, Iseult, was born. There was no real bonding between this disappointed mother and her daughter to the point that she attempted to conceal she was Iseult's mother. At this point, her relationship Millevoye was over, but the one with Yeats continued with, over the years, several marriage proposals; she declined each one. She said, "… that the world should thank her for never having accepted his proposals". She was cast as Cathleen, the title role, in Yeats' play "Cathleen ni Houlihan" in 1902. Though not pleasing to Yeats, she converted the same year to Roman Catholicism. While touring the United States for support for of "Irish Freedom", she met Major John MacBride of the Irish Transvaal Brigade; he had fought in South Africa against the British. In Paris, France on February 21, 1903, she and MacBride married, became parents to a son, Sean, the next year; and the following year, she filed for divorce claiming abuse and wanting full custody of their son. The French divorce and custody laws supported her needs more than the Irish laws. In 1906, she was not granted the divorce but given a legal separation. Although she had custody of their son in France, the father was given liberal visitation rights until their son was twelve years-old. MacBride returned to Ireland to continue his agenda of "fighting for Irish freedom"; he never saw their son again. On May 5, 1916, he was executed by the English Crown for his participation in the bloody rebellion called the Easter Rising of 1916. Yeats was devastated by the her marriage to MacBride, yet he mentioned MacBride in the poem "Easter 1916". Though she had spent the majority of her life in France, she felt safe and returned with Sean to Ireland after MacBride's death. In 1918, she was, without any charges filed by British, imprisoned for six months and became deathly ill from the poor conditions of the prison. Shortly after that, her son was also imprisoned. After their harsh imprisonments, she was an active campaigner for the release of political prisoners in Ireland along with being outspoken and, at times, militant about Irish politics. She rallied women to become involved in politics. In 1922, soldiers raided her Dublin home burning most of her papers in the streets, including, sadly, the majority of the love letters written to her by Yeats. After his death, she did publish some of their remaining letters. She used being the martyr MacBride's widow to help her to advance in her political causes and was given credit as one of the founders of Sinn Féin. In August 1938, she met with Yeats one last time in Rathfarnham for tea. The same year Yeats wrote "A Bronze Head" about her frequent appearances at political funerals, a "dark tomb-haunter," a description so different from the light, gentle woman he remembered of years ago. In the end, they became old friends that respected each other, yet they had grown very far apart in the religious and political thinking. Her indifference to her daughter continued after death with no mention of Iseult in her will, yet she asked to be buried with George's baby shoes in her coffin. A book of her reminiscences, "A Servant of the Queen", was published in 1938; she refers to Iseult as a "niece" in the book. Her younger son became Nobel Peace Prize recipient Sean MacBride.