![]() ![]() She was attached to cultural nationalism through people like Yeats and Lady Gregory. So what exactly did this rebel do? Gonne was involved in nearly every active strand of late 19th and early 20th-century Irish nationalism and republicanism. ![]() She cast those around her into various parts in her self-glorifying drama. “We don’t know much about Bowie,” Bendheim writes, except that she was ‘a sociable soul,’ and a healer.” This we learn from Gonne’s autobiography, a source that Bendheim refers to often, not as an authoritative text, but to illustrate how much of Gonne’s life was a deliberate fabrication. The only real constant in her youth was her nurse, Bowie. She followed her father as he was assigned to various administrative postings sometimes she lived with relatives while he was serving in the far reaches of the empire. Born in England, Maud was raised in Ireland, England, and France. Her wealth, along with the early loss of her mother, an absent father whom she adored, and a peripatetic upbringing contributed to what would be a protean life. When she was a young woman Maud inherited an enormous fortune, and that made it possible for her to escape many of the traditional expectations of her gender and station as a well-spoken (though not classically educated) daughter of an English military officer. She interrogates the intense relationships Gonne fostered throughout her long life as an indefatigable freedom fighter. “She was a formidable political agitator,” Bendheim explains, “a feminist before the term was coined.” T he Fascination of What’s Difficult deepens our understanding of Gonne by examining the social, political, and personal circumstances of her life as she traverses the various tendencies and personalities of Irish rebellion.īendheim has done her background reading, but this is not an academic exercise. Yeats’s muse or “the Irish Joan of Arc.” Neither accolade is wholly adequate because they stop short of recognizing her radicalism. She “became seduced not, as one might expect, by the great poet’s few surviving letters to her, but by Maud’s voice on the page.” Later, as a graduate student, a professor encouraged Bendheim to write about the woman who is often idolized as either W.B. She was a great mythmaker.” Maud’s appetite for fantasy, often in service of a political objective, took its psychological toll on the woman who, in a 1902 one-act drama by William Butler Yeats and Lady Gregory, played Cathleen Ni Houlihan, an archetypal image of Mother Ireland that captivated the imagination of a nation yearning for freedom.īendheim’s fascination with Maud Gonne (1866-1953) dates back to 1993 when she reviewed a collection of Gonne-Yeats letters. “Maud had a talent,” Bendheim writes, “for rearranging events for public display, as if she were the heroine of her own splendid adventure story. ![]() Penetrating beyond preconceptions about Maud proved to be demanding. The result is a compelling study of a woman who for too long has been perceived as otherworldly, despite the fact that she had dedicated her life to Ireland’s revolutionary struggle. ![]() In fact, she embraces it in a succinct but richly detailed critical biography of one of Ireland’s most celebrated and enigmatic political and cultural figures. In her first book, T he Fascination of What’s Difficult: A Life of Maud Gonne, Kim Bendheim does not shy away from complication. Complex figures are flattened, stripped of their vital humanity. The authorized version inevitably obscures the preceding chaos, tangled fallout, and intricacies of Ireland’s political transformation. The chronicle of how an oppressed colony becomes an independent nation-state is a sympathetic saga, its venerable underdogs practically canonized. The air-brushing is a by-product of the nationalist meat-grinder. Difficult parts of the past are often swept under the rug so the “official” story can be marketed. There is a tendency in popular Irish historicism to favor the myth. The Fascination of What’s Difficult: A Life of Maud Gonne by Kim Bendheim. “What happens when you discover your heroine was a vile anti-Semite?” ![]()
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