Alice Stopford Green

Today’s blog post is about Alice Stopford Green- an Anglo-Irish historian and nationalist and a member of the first Seanad Éireann (Irish Senate). She is best remembered for her historical works, such as The Making of Ireland and its Undoing, which challenged English perceptions of Irish history and supported Irish independence and Home Rule. She also played a role in the 1914 Howth gunrunning. Her final major historical work, A History of the Irish State to 1014, was published in 1925. There were many sides to Green as SJL wrote in the Irish Press in 1992:

The daughter of a County Meath clergyman, Mrs. Stopford Green was a liberal by temperament, and she became attracted to Irish nationalism through her study of history. Her London home was a meeting place for scholars, literary people, foreign refugees, Irish nationalists and colonial administrators, with the hostess herself directing the course of every discussion. In the 1920's an acquaintance recalled a dinner in which she had sat five young liberals opposite five Fabians and noted that in the intervening years all the liberals had become cabinet ministers. After 1916 she moved back to Dublin and when the Irish Free State was set up, she became, a member of its Senate. But it was her writing on Irish history, which ensured that she would be remembered. She died on May 28th, 1929.

The Leitrim Observer wrote of her death:

within two days pf her 82nd birthday, Mrs. Alice Stopford Green, the noted Irish historian, died at her home in St. Stephen's Green, Dublin. She will be mourned by as many people in England as in Ireland, for by force of her great personality and intellectual attainments she was the centre of a brilliant coterie in both countries. Gladstone, Tennyson, Browning, Mary Kingsley, and Florence Nightingale were among her friends. 

For more search the pages of the Irish Newspaper Archive (www.irishnewsarchive.com )