SHE
stares rather disconsolately into the middle distance like a little too
much absinthe has been taken and a cigarette droops languidly from her
full lips. Her companion stares directly and defiantly at the
camera, beautiful, Bohemian and with sexual frankness that would have
scandalised her contemporaries in well born Anglo-Irish society.
Even today it is a provocative image but this remarkable photograph
also sheds new light on two of the wildest women in Irish history.
The gaunt and hauntingly fragile figure on the left is none other than
Countess Constance Markiewicz - revolutionary, suffragette and
Ireland's first woman cabinet minister. On the right is the
artist Althea Gyles, the wild red-headed poet who was to design and
illustrate Yeats's great masterpieces andwho, like Yeats, dabbled inthe
occult in a life punctuated by excess and sexual shenanigans.
Jerome Reilly
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