A.E. George RUSSELL. Selected by. New Songs. A Lyric Selection made by A.E. from Poems by Padraic Colum, Eva Gore-Booth, Thomas Keohler, Alice Milligan, Susan Mitchell, Seumas O’Sullivan, George Roberts, and Ella Young. Frontispiece ‘The Plougher’ by Jack B. Yeats [SIGNED BY MOST OF THE CONTRIBUTORS]

Dublin: O’Donoghue & Co. London: Bullen, 1904. Third edition. pp. 56. Original greyblue paper boards, title on printed label on upper cover. Paper repair to spine. Signed by Louise Gavan Duffy in Irish on verso of frontispiece. Previous owner’s inscription on front endpaper. Wear to corners. A very good copy.
George Russell gathered his selection from poems which appeared in ‘The United Irishman’ and ‘The Celtic Christmas’, and more especially from original manuscripts given to him by writers too shy to have their identity made public. Louise Gavan Duffy [Luíse Ghabhánach Ní Dhufaigh] (1884-1969) was an educator, an Irish language enthusiast and a Gaelic revivalist, setting up the first Gaelscoil in Ireland. She was also a suffragist and Irish nationalist who was present in the General Post Office, the main headquarters during the 1916 Easter Rising. After 1916 she went on to become an influential member of Cumann na mBan’s executive and a signatory of a petition demanding self determination for Ireland that was handed to President Woodrow Wilson by Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington in 1918. Louise was born in Nice, France, the daughter of Sir Charles Gavan Duffy, one of the founders of The Nation and his third wife, Louise (née Hall) from Cheshire, England. Her father, and later her brothers, were important figures in political and legal spheres in Ireland and Australia. Between 1911 and 1912 she managed and taught at Scoil Ide, a school for girls set up by Padraig Pearse. She was one of the first women to graduate from University College Dublin, earning a Bachelor of Arts in 1911. Her interest in women’s suffrage and Irish nationalism led to close connections with those movements and with similarly minded women. She became a founding member of two of the country’s paramilitary republican organisations for women, Cumann na mBan and Cumann na Saoirse.