Qualla: Lissadell House

Lissadell House: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kay Atherton, CC BY-SA 2.0. 'The light of evening, Lissadell, great windows open to the south, two girls in silk kimonos, both beautiful, one a gazelle.' W.B. Yeats wrote those lines for the Gore-Booth sisters he had known when they were young: Constance, who would marry a Polish count and pick up a rifle in 1916, and Eva, who would become a poet and a suffragist in Manchester. They grew up here, in a Greek Revival mansion on the south shore of the Maugherow Peninsula, with the windows facing south over Drumcliff Bay and Benbulben rising in the distance.

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Image: Kay Atherton | CC BY-SA 2.0

Lissadell House: Austere in the Extreme

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kay Atherton, CC BY-SA 2.0. The house was built between 1830 and 1835 for Sir Robert Gore-Booth, 4th Baronet, by the London architect Francis Goodwin. Critics called it 'austere in the extreme,' a description the Gore-Booths seemed to take as praise. Nine bays wide, two storeys over a basement, built of Bal...

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Image: Kay Atherton | CC BY-SA 2.0

Lissadell House: Two Girls in Silk Kimonos

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kay Atherton, CC BY-SA 2.0. Constance Gore-Booth was born in 1868. Eva followed two years later. Their childhood at Lissadell included hunting and riding through 32,000 acres of estate, summers when Yeats visited, the warmth and ease of Anglo-Irish aristocracy in its last comfortable decades. Constance went...

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Image: Kay Atherton | CC BY-SA 2.0

Lissadell House: Yeats's Bitter Postscript

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit en:The.Q, CC BY-SA 2.5. Yeats's poem 'In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markievicz' is not entirely tender. He saw Constance's revolutionary politics as a waste of beauty. 'The older is condemned to death,' he wrote, 'pardoned, drags out lonely years, conspiring among the ignorant.' Eva, he thought, h...

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Image: en:The.Q | CC BY-SA 2.5

Lissadell House: The Long Argument

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kay Atherton, CC BY-SA 2.0. The estate's history includes its harder chapters. Before the Great Famine, Sir Robert Gore-Booth cleared the settlement of Ballygilgan as part of estate 'improvement,' through what was called 'assisted emigration.' Whether those people went willingly is still argued. In the 1950...

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Image: Kay Atherton | CC BY-SA 2.0

Lissadell House: What the House Holds

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Joseph Christian Leyendecker (1874 - 1951), Public domain. Constance Markievicz died in 1927. Eva had died the year before. Yeats wrote his elegy in 1927, looking back at a childhood scene that was already half a century gone. The house still stands, with its south-facing windows and its limestone facade and its memory of two sisters in ...

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Image: Joseph Christian Leyendecker (1874 - 1951) | Public domain