Her father, a liberal unionist and well-known antiquarian, organized talks and lectures for the local workingmen's institute and drew his daughter into discussion of history, international affairs and literature.

[2] After a year studying in English history and literature at King's College, London, Milligan trained as a teacher and 1888 secured a position as a Latin instructor at the MacKillip's Ladies Collegiate School in Derry.

In the north, in Ulster, she focused on the more difficult task of recruiting Protestants, working with, among other activists, League president Douglas Hyde, Ada McNeill, Roger Casement, Stephen Gwynn, and Seamus McManus.

In June 1891 she saw the beleaguered leader of Irish nationalism at a public meeting "beaten and ashamed" by the furore created by his being named in a divorce case (his affair with Kitty O'Shea).

[4] In the poem "At Maynooth" she scathingly contrasts the private life of George V, in 1911 rapturously received at the Catholic seminary by Cardinal Logue, to that of the man once hailed as Ireland's "uncrowned King".

Until then she described herself (despite her father's relative liberalism) as still very much a product of a "Tory and Protestant" upbringing, blinded to the literature and history of her native land by her formal education.

Bigger was a wealthy Presbyterian solicitor; like her father an avid antiquarian (he co-edited the journal of the Irish Folklore Society with Milligan's sister Charlotte);[15] and a celebrated host.

However, the descendants of the "Protestant leaders and peasants" who, according to Milligan, had sealed Tone's union of creeds on "the battle field and scaffold",[17] effectively restricted any commemorative display to Catholic districts.

A processive outing (organised with help of Lyttle)[13] to the grave of Betsy Gray, heroine of the Battle of Ballynahinch, ended in a fracas and the destruction by unionists of her memorial stone.

[19] They had been editing the paper of another commemorative circle, the Henry Joy McCracken Literary Society, the Northern Patriot, but in December 1895 they were dismissed possibly because in three of their four issues they had supported amnesty for Fenian prisoners.

The second issue (Belfast, February 1896)[23] contained the following: "America ... Oh mighty foster land" (poem); "The Captain’s Daughter" (a serial written by Milligan under the name Iris Olkyrn); "The Lonely One" (poem); "The Rise and Fall of the Fenian Movement of ‘67" (serialised history); "Manus O’Mallaghan and the Fairies" (folklore); "Irish Football Victory"; "On Inisheer’" (poem); "Willie Kane of the “Northern Star”, How He Escaped the Scaffold" (United Irishman); "Irishmen in the Transvaal" (volunteers with the Boers against the British); "The Burial-Place of the Sheares" (United Irishmen); "Our National Language"; "James Clarence Mangan"; "Reviews – The life of Owen Roe O'Neill (the rebel Ulster chieftain), The Life and Writings of Fintan Lalor" (prophet of the Land War); "Our Notebook’" (diary and announcements); "The Moonlighters Hound" (poem); "For the Old Land" (review of different agencies advancing the national cause).The very first issue, January 1896, had given a platform to James Connolly: "Socialism and Nationalism", his argument that without a creed capable of challenging the rule of the capitalist, landlord and financier, the nationalism of "Irish Language movements, Literary Societies or Commemoration Committees" would achieve little.

Yet while expressing "full sympathy with Mr Connolly's views on the labour and social questions", Milligan opposed the formation of his Irish Socialist Republican Party and refused their invitation to lecture.

[25] A young society woman in Protestant Belfast, forced in wake of the McCracken's execution to attend a British Red-Coat ball, secures the devotion of own her beloved rebel, a country Catholic on the run, by scandalously wearing green slippers and black (mourning) crepe.

[26] Despite the acclaim, the journal's attempt to unify nationalists across region, class, sex and religion proved untenable: no faction or party was prepared to provide enough financial support to sustain it.

Shan Van Vocht's subscription list was passed to Arthur Griffith and his new weekly, the United Irishman, organ of Cumann na nGaedheal the forerunner of Sinn Féin.

[29] In the October 1896 issue of Shan Van Vocht, she had condemned the use of dynamite methods:Those who would stoop to suggest, or organise, or carry out anything of the sort, degrade the name of their country, and in the eyes of the whole world render her less worthy of Nationhood.

[...] Stern and terrible deeds are often done and may justly be done in such a strife as ours; but this method of bomb throwing and blowing up buildings, without aim or reason other than the mere desire for vengeance is imbecile and wrong.This was not the light in which she saw the 1916 Easter Rising.

Following close upon the death of her parents and her sister Charlotte (whom she had been nursing in London), the insurrection in Dublin, and the executions and loss of Connolly, Tomas MacDonagh and others she had known, affected her deeply.

[1][5] Milligan supported Sinn Féin in the 1918 general election, campaigning for the trade unionist and East Rising veteran Winifred Carney in Belfast.

[30] While aghast at the civil war that followed, she also sided with Éamon de Valera in rejecting the 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty, refusing dominion status and Partition in lieu of the republic.

Milligan's contemporary and fellow poet, Susan Langstaff Mitchell, wrote of her in 1919:In almost every one of the national and intellectual activities in Ireland now known to everyone – the Gaelic Revival, the dramatic movement, the literary renaissance – this indefatigable Irish girl was there at the start of them.

[34] From 1898, in short succession Milligan wrote eleven plays staged by Maud Gonne's Inghinidhe na hÉireann (Daughters of Ireland), the Gaelic League and Irish Literary Theatre.

The play's lack of action and use of music (provided by her sister Charlotte) created moments of "picturesque stillness" on stage suggestive of the tableaux vivant which Milligan mounted on tour for the Gaelic League.

[36] The Freeman's Journal reported that the Fenian chief, veteran of the 1867 Rising, "favoured the authoress by appearing [on stage] amongst the band of warriors [Fianna] feasting at the banquet board".

[37] The reviewer of the Dublin edition of the Daily Express concluded that "if the aim of the Irish Literary Theatre is to create a national drama", it was "obvious" that Miss Milligan's method was "the proper road" to follow.

[38] Yeats, who was working with George Moore on a comparable project (Diarmuid and Grania), did allow that the play "touched the heart as some greater drama on some foreign theme would not".

[44] In 1914, acknowledging Milligan as "a northern Protestant woman who had denounced the unionist Anglo-centric doctrine of her upbringing", Tomas MacDonagh described hers as "a cultural practice that gave voice to those (like herself) who were so often confined to the footnotes of colonial history".