For Eva Gore-Booth, the political was always personal. Her writing is characterised by a humane tone, an intimate knowledge of the people affected by the issues she addresses, and by precise theoretical detail, whether she is writing about the economics of wage inequality or theological principles. In this volume, her work is arranged in the order in which Gore-Booth prioritised her concerns: women’s suffrage and women’s trade unionism, pacifism and conscientious objection, and Irish nationalism. Yet these classifications, as Sonja Tiernan makes clear, are not distinct categories but overlapping aspects of her Weltanschauung.

For example, in an essay, ‘The Sinn Féin rebellion’, published in the Socialist Review in summer 1916, Eva Gore-Booth cited an article by the secretary of the Housing Sub-Committee of the Dublin Watch Committee, Clara Moser, published in the Daily News in June 1916. According to Moser’s report on housing conditions in Dublin, which was commissioned by the Local Government Board, in 1914 there were 37,552 people living in houses that were ‘fast approaching the state of being unfit for human habitation’ and a further 22,701 people occupying houses ‘unfit for human habitation and incapable of being made so’. Gore-Booth quoted Moser’s article: ‘So long as these conditions are allowed to exist … there will be bred in the minds of the inhabitants that form of discontent which ends in desperation, and which must always be expected to break out in ruinous violence.’ Gore-Booth’s letters and essays on behalf of Roger Casement similarly demonstrate her unified thought, decrying the death penalty and the ‘sanctity’ of the ‘English state’. For the careful reader, there are subtle but nonetheless essential connections between Gore-Booth’s campaign to preserve the lives of conscientious objectors during the First World War and her attempts to intervene in British–Irish affairs; in an open letter to the Manchester Guardian in July 1921, she argued, ‘Surely if the military machine goes on acting without regard to any change in the moral atmosphere it is the duty of the civil Government of this country to interfere before it is too late. If there is to be any chance of peace with Ireland all executions must stop.’

As a relentless suffrage campaigner and trade-union activist, Gore-Booth was required to repeat her arguments to various audiences, and those repetitions carry over into the selections for this volume. This is particularly evident in the first and longest section, which comprises about half of the volume and contains several essays advocating for the rights of employment for barmaids and florists, whose survival – and the survival of their entire families – was threatened by sexist labour legislation. The repetition is not without effect. Although wearying for the reader intent on reading the volume straight through, Gore-Booth’s persistent restatement of the facts conveys a tenacity and consistency that gives important insight into her personality as well as her activism. Her long campaign begins here with an essay to the London Times in early 1903 and ends with an essay attacking the ‘failure of the [democractic] machinery’ in a letter to the Manchester Guardian in January 1919. The volume then loops back to 1914 at the start of the second section, with an essay on pacifism delivered to the National Industrial and Professional Women’s Suffrage Society in London. At that meeting, Gore-Booth argued that ‘physical force is not a possible basis for society; it is the destruction of society. To found society on physical force is like founding it on a volcano’, a declamation that evokes Sylvia Townshend Warner’s description of Constance Markievicz as living ‘in a narrow society, gay and assured, with the gaiety and assurance of those who live habitually on the slopes of a volcano’. In contrast to her sister, Eva Gore-Booth’s radicalism was not incendiary, but, as Sonja Tiernan’s selections for this volume make clear, it was no less radical. Like Francis Sheehy-Skeffington, as described by Gore-Booth in an essay published for the first time here, she ‘was a fighting pacifist, and might have said with Blake, “I will not cease from mental fight, nor shall the sword fall from my hand, till I have built Jerusalem.”’