Eva Gore-Booth was a poet, suffragist and social activist, whose life and work demonstrate a remarkable blend of philosophical engagement and commitment to social justice. Born into a prominent landowning family at Lissadell, Co. Sligo, she was educated by a governess in both classical and modern languages. She was well travelled in Europe and the Americas, and it was on a continental trip taken as a result of poor health that Gore-Booth met Englishwoman Esther Roper, with whom she would spend the rest of her life. In 1897 she moved to Manchester and devoted her life to social work. The following year her first book of poems was published, a volume that largely conformed to the expectations of the Celtic Twilight, yet showed the formal promise that would be fulfilled by her later work. Influenced by classical texts and by various forms of artistic representation, Gore-Booth's lyric poems imbue the sensory world with a spirit of intellectual enquiry through the taut musicality of her poetic line—a quality that becomes established in her 1905 volume The Three Resurrections and the Triumph of Maeve. Though her work with Roper was chiefly concerned with improving the working conditions and educational opportunities of women, this ideological commitment may only be seen obliquely in her poetry. In keeping with the extraordinarily uncompromising life she chose, Gore- Booth's writing became less conventional as her poetic career progressed and her late poems in particular bear the marks of an independent mind with a strong capability for abstract thought and precise use of form and language. In later years she studied Greek and theosophy and her poetry became increasingly marked by these influences.