Episode 820: The Life of Eva Gore-Booth with Sonja Tiernan

In Episode 820, Jacke talks to Sonja Tiernan about her book Eva Gore-Booth: Irish Radical Poet, Rebel, and Reformer, which tells the story of a young woman who cast aside her aristocratic origins to champion the causes of barmaids, circus performers, flower sellers, and pit-brow lasses.

Living in Manchester with her partner, Esther Roper, Gore-Booth became an unsung hero of LGBTQ+ history, editing a radical journal and publishing nineteen volumes of poetry and prose that drew the admiration of fellow writers like W.B. Yeats.

For a glimpse of Gore-Booth's poetry, here's the opening stanza to her poem "Weariness":

Amid the glare of light and song

   And talk that knows not when to cease,   

The sullen voices of the throng,

   My weary soul cries out for peace,   

Peace and the quietness of death;

   The wash of waters deep and cool,   

The wind too faint for any breath

   To stir oblivion’s silent pool,

When all who swim against the stream,

   And they that laugh, and they that weep,   

Shall change like flowers in a dream

   That wither on the brows of sleep.