On 28 December 1918, she was the first woman elected to the UK House of Commons,[4] though, being in Holloway Prison at the time and in accordance with party policy, she did not take her seat.

During the famine of 1879–80, Sir Henry provided free food for the tenants on his estate at Lissadell House in the north of County Sligo in the north-west of Ireland.

The sisters were childhood friends of the poet W. B. Yeats, who frequently visited the family home Lissadell House, and were influenced by his artistic and political ideas.

[5] Eva later became involved in the labour movement and women's suffrage in Great Britain, although initially Constance did not share her sister's ideals.

Later she moved to Paris and enrolled at the prestigious Académie Julian where she met her future husband, Casimir Markievicz, an artist from a wealthy Polish family from present-day Ukraine.

Sarah Purser, whom the young Gore-Booth sisters first met in 1882, when she was commissioned to paint their portrait, hosted a regular salon where artists, writers and intellectuals on both sides of the nationalist divide gathered.

She joined Sinn Féin and Inghinidhe na hÉireann ('Daughters of Ireland'), a revolutionary women's movement founded by the actress and activist Maud Gonne, muse of WB Yeats.

Markievicz came directly to her first meeting from a function at Dublin Castle, the seat of British rule in Ireland, wearing a satin ball gown and a diamond tiara.

In the same year, Markievicz played a dramatic role in the women's suffrage campaigners' tactic of opposing Winston Churchill's election to Parliament during the Manchester North West by-election, flamboyantly appearing in the constituency driving an old-fashioned carriage drawn by four white horses to promote the suffragist cause.

At the Fianna's first meeting in Camden Street, Dublin, on 16 August 1909, she was almost expelled on the basis that women did not belong in a physical force movement.

[12] She was jailed for the first time in 1911 for speaking at an Irish Republican Brotherhood demonstration attended by 30,000 people, organised to protest against George V's visit to Ireland.

During this protest, Markievicz handed out leaflets, erected great banners emblazoned Dear land thou art not conquered yet, participated in stone-throwing at pictures of the King and Queen and attempted to burn the giant British flag taken from Leinster House, eventually succeeding, but then seeing James McArdle imprisoned for one month for the incident, despite Markievicz testifying in court that she was responsible.

[13] Her friend Helena Molony was arrested for her part in the stone-throwing and became the first woman in Ireland to be tried and imprisoned for a political act since the time of the Ladies Land League.

[13] Markievicz joined James Connolly's socialist Irish Citizen Army (ICA), a volunteer force formed in response to the lock-out of 1913 to defend the demonstrating workers from the police.

That year, with Inghinidhe na hÉireann, she ran a soup kitchen to feed poor children and enable them to attend school.

[15] Markievicz fought in St Stephen's Green, where on the first morning —according to the only two pages surviving of the diary of an alleged witness — she shot a member of the Dublin Metropolitan Police, Constable Lahiff, who subsequently died of his injuries.

[20] Markievicz supervised the setting-up of barricades on Easter Monday and was in the middle of the fighting all around Stephen's Green, wounding a British army sniper.

The British officer, Captain (later Major) de Courcy Wheeler, who accepted their surrender was married to Markievicz's first cousin, Selina Maude Beresford Knox.

[31] Markievicz was in Holloway prison when her colleagues assembled in Dublin at the first meeting of the First Dáil, the Parliament of the revolutionary Irish Republic.

She worked actively for the Republican cause in the Irish Civil War, including directing the Citizen Army in the occupation of Moran's Hotel in Dublin.

Members of Cumann na mBan assisted the anti-treaty forces and carried dispatches between the occupied Four Courts buildings and the Dublin Brigade headquarters.

[38] She left Sinn Féin and joined Fianna Fáil on its foundation in 1926, chairing the inaugural meeting of the new party in La Scala Theatre.

[47] Prior to her death, Esther Roper maintained a vigil at Constance's bed with Marie Perolz, Helena Molony, Kathleen Lynn and other friends.

Eamon de Valera gave the funeral oration, while Free State soldiers stood on guard to prevent the rifle salute that Michael Collins had called "the only speech which it is proper to make above the grave of a dead Fenian".

[51] In 2018, a portrait of Markievicz was donated by the Irish parliament to the British House of Commons to commemorate the 1918 Representation of the People Act, under which, some women were allowed the right to vote for the first time in the United Kingdom.

[53] In 2008, a Ukrainian village of Zhyvotivka, where Constance stayed with the Markievicz family in 1903, opened a room dedicated to the couple with the documents brought from Lissadel.