Cathleen ni Houlihan

When Yeats’s play Cathleen ni Houlihan was first performed in Dublin in 1902, she played the title role. It was during this period that Yeats came under the influence of John O’Leary, a charismatic leader of the Fenians, a secret society of Irish nationalists.

…heroine of his first play, Cathleen ni Houlihan (1892), was modeled after her; she played the title role when the play was first produced at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. However, Gonne refused Yeats’s many marriage proposals. She had become involved with a French journalist in 1887 while recovering from…

…counterversion of that play was Cathleen Ni Houlihan (1902), which became the central literary moment of the renaissance. In that play—set in 1798, the year of the Irish Rebellion—an old woman persuades a young man to forgo marriage and fight for his country instead; upon leaving the man at the…