Constance Markievicz (above) and Roy Foster’s Vivid Faces
A taste for unorthodox night manoeuvres.
With boy scouts.
Apparently.
“[R]evolutionary Ireland was an important location for the ‘theatre of revolt’, in a literal sense. But one central aspect of that revolt more or less absent from the drama written and acted by the future revolutionaries concerns the world of sex… The revolutionaries were part of a generation which explored other forms of liberation besides the political and national… One of the attractions of the Gaelic League,especially its summer schools and ceilidhe, was the opportunities it provided for romantic and sexual contact… Constance Markievicz, with her hard-drinking and erratic Polish husband, may have been allowed a similar licence (Bulmer Hobson later told his son Declan of his surprise when she demanded to warm herself, on night manoeuvres with her Fianna boy scouts, by getting into bed with them)…”
From Vivid Faces: The Revolutionary Generation in Ireland, 1890-1923 by Roy Foster (Penguin Books) published this week.
*thud*
Also: FIGHT!
Pic: National Library of Ireland
Thanks Sibling of Daedalus
padraig pearse’s skin mag collection was legendary.
Some imagination for an academic.
Constant craving.