Constance Markievicz was born at Lissadell House, County Sligo, Ireland, into the Anglo-Irish landed gentry family of Gore-Booth.
On 4 February 1868, Constance Georgine Gore-Booth was born at Lissadell House, a grand estate in County Sligo, Ireland, to Sir Henry Gore-Booth, a wealthy Arctic explorer and landlord, and Lady Georgina Gore-Booth. She was the eldest of five children in a family of the Anglo-Irish Protestant Ascendancy.
Raised amid privilege, Constance and her siblings were nonetheless exposed to progressive ideas; her father's relatively benevolent treatment of tenants during the famine years of the 1870s and 1880s left an impression on her. She and her sister Eva Gore-Booth (who became a poet and suffragist) were educated by governesses at home before Constance pursued formal art training abroad.
Her aristocratic birth might have predicted a conventional life of privilege, yet Constance would go on to reject her class's expectations, becoming one of the most radical revolutionary figures in modern Irish history. Her origins at Lissadell, later immortalised in W.B. Yeats's poetry, stand in stark contrast to the militant nationalist and socialist path she would forge, making her transformation from countess to revolutionary all the more historically remarkable.
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