Maud Gonne
Irish revolutionary and activist (1866-1953)
Maud Gonne MacBride (Irish: Maud Nic Ghoinn Bean Mhic Giolla Bhríghde; born Edith Maud Gonne; 21 December 1866 – 27 April 1953) was an Irish republican revolutionary, suffragette and actress. She claimed Anglo-Irish descent, but had been born in England to English parents. Gonne actively agitated for Home Rule and then for the republic declared in 1916. During the 1930s, as a founding member of the Social Credit Party, she promoted the distributive programme of C. H. Douglas. At the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, she expressed support for Germany. Gonne was well known for being the muse and long-time love interest of Irish poet W. B. Yeats.
Early life
Gonne was born in England at Tongham near Aldershot, Hampshire, in 1866, the eldest daughter of Captain Thomas Gonne of the 17th Lancers and Edith Frith Gonne (née Cook), both from established English families. Despite this, she sought to claim an Irish lineage, writing in her autobiography A Servant of the Queen that she was "the daughter of an Irish father and an English mother" and suggesting that her family came from County Mayo before being disinherited and turning to the wine trade. No evidence supports this assertion and biographers have confirmed her ancestry was English for generations.
In 1868, amidst high tension in Ireland following the 1867 Fenian Rising, Captain Thomas Gonne was appointed brigade major of the cavalry in Ireland and stationed at the Curragh Camp in County Kildare.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Maud Gonne” as irish revolutionary and activist (1866-1953). Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 20, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q444601. VIAF identifies the subject as 32066208. The Library of Congress control number is n79034827. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1866, 1953, 1916 and 1939.
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This entry incorporates text from “Maud Gonne” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.