Photo from Wikimedia Commons.
In photographs, Eva Gore-Booth often appears impossibly serene. High collars, soft eyes, an undeniable calm. It is easy at first glance to mistake her for exactly what generations of Irish historians turned her into: a gentle poet standing politely in the enormous shadow of her older sister, Constance Markievicz. But Eva Gore-Booth spent much of her life involved in something far more radical than Irish history has comfortably known what to do with. In Manchester and London, among suffragists, writers and queer intellectuals, she became part of a remarkable network imagining entirely new ways of living. At the centre of that world sat a curious little journal called Urania, filled with poetry, newspaper clippings, political reflections and stories gathered from across the globe.
First published in 1916, Urania circulated privately in extremely small numbers, often shared by hand or through trusted networks rather than sold publicly.
Surviving copies of the journal are hard to come by; some are now held in archives such as the British Library and the LSE Women’s Library, reflecting its limited original circulation.
For decades, Irish history struggled to know where to place Eva Gore-Booth. Markievicz, wrapped in revolutionary praise, became iconic. Eva remained blurrier. Yet the sisters were not as politically distant as they are often portrayed. Both distrusted hierarchy. Both were drawn toward social revolution. Both rejected the narrow expectations placed upon women of their class.
They simply travelled toward different versions of freedom. Where Markievicz marched through streets in military uniform, Eva moved through industrial corridors organising women workers, campaigning for suffrage and building intellectual communities that questioned not only political systems, but social conventions themselves.
Much of that work unfolded alongside Esther Roper, the English activist and writer who would become Gore-Booth’s lifelong partner. Together, they formed one of the most important yet historically under-acknowledged partnerships in Irish and British feminist history. Their relationship shaped not only their politics but the emotional and intellectual atmosphere around Urania itself.
The publication emerged during the turbulence of the First World War, a period when nationalism, militarism and rigid social order were hardening across Europe. Against that backdrop, Urania felt defiantly unconventional. It rejected war, hierarchy and social conformity with an unusual mixture of seriousness and optimism.
At the centre of its orbit was one of the most fascinating figures of the early 20th century: Irene Clyde. Born Thomas Baty, Clyde was a lawyer, novelist, scholar and deeply original thinker whose ideas profoundly shaped the publication’s worldview. Writing under the pseudonym ‘Theta’, Clyde had already founded the Aëthnic Union in 1911, a group dedicated to challenging restrictive ideas around sex and social identity. But to reduce Clyde merely to a set of political ideas misses what made the figure so compelling.
Clyde was a barrister writing fantastical novels. A legal scholar questioning social structures. A person who moved through Edwardian society while refusing its assumptions about identity and behaviour. Clyde’s writing carried intellectual sharpness and imaginative possibility, a combination that would become central to Urania.
The journal never functioned like a conventional political publication. It was too eclectic for that. Its pages drifted between poetry, international news clippings, historical anecdotes, essays and reports of lives lived beyond ordinary social expectation. Some issues, for example, reprinted press reports of individuals living as the “opposite sex,” as evidence of social possibility. Readers encountered stories about women living independently, same-sex companionships, androgyny, activism and literary women whose lives resisted easy categorisation.
Reading it now feels oddly intimate, like opening a box of carefully preserved fragments from a hidden intellectual history. At the front of every issue sat the journal’s now-famous declaration: “There are no ‘men’ or ‘women’ in Urania.”
Dr Sonja Tiernan, author of Eva Gore-Booth: Irish Radical Poet, Rebel and Reformer, whose groundbreaking research helped restore Eva Gore-Booth to Irish queer history, believes Gore-Booth was central to shaping the journal’s intellectual direction.
“Many articles note specifically that Eva was the founder and driver behind establishing the journal Urania,” Tiernan says. “Her writings are often dispersed in the pages, so we can deliberate that Eva was central to the intellectual direction.”
That direction emerged not only through politics but through curiosity about human lives that existed outside convention. Across her poetry, essays and political writings, Gore-Booth repeatedly returned to people who crossed social boundaries or refused expected roles.
“There are others at this time who advocate for a genderless world and explain the possibility through esoteric religion such as theosophy,” Tiernan explains. “From researching Eva’s full body of writing, and there are 19 volumes, she is attempting to highlight that many people cross gender and sex constructs in their daily lives.”
Importantly, Urania did not approach these subjects with the clinical distance common to many early 20thcentury discussions about sexuality or identity; instead, its editors drew extensively on contemporary sexology and medical literature, including reports on transition-related medical interventions, hormonal research, and cases of people living outside conventional gender categories. Rather than treating these subjects as merely pathological or sensational, Urania frequently presented them as evidence that rigid distinctions between male and female were socially constructed and historically unstable.
Much queer history survives in fragments shaped by secrecy, fear or criminalisation. Urania contains those realities too. It circulated privately for a reason, but it is also full of pleasure. Pleasure in intellectual rebellion. Pleasure in friendship. Pleasure in discovering evidence that humanity has always been more inventive than rigid social systems allow.
That sense of collectivity mattered enormously. The journal’s contributors formed a loose but deeply connected network that included Gore-Booth, Roper, Clyde, Dorothy Cornish and Jessey Wade, among others. They were writers, reformers and campaigners. Many had backgrounds in suffrage activism, but Urania pushed beyond conventional feminist politics of the era.
While many suffrage organisations focused primarily on voting rights, the Urania circle questioned broader structures of power and expectation. They opposed militarism and criticised the assumptions attached to masculinity, nationalism and empire.
Tiernan believes the publication’s contributors genuinely imagined a world less constrained by rigid social categories. “To Eva, this is simply her goal toward what she views as an ideal world,” she says, “one where people are not constrained by mainstream constructs.”
Reading that now, from a contemporary perspective, feels surprisingly moving. Ireland has changed dramatically in recent decades. Queer life is no longer forced entirely into secrecy. Conversations around identity, partnership and selfhood have entered mainstream culture in ways the Urania circle could scarcely have imagined. And yet many of the publication’s questions still resonate: Who gets to define normality? What kinds of lives are erased by official history? How much human possibility is lost when societies insist upon rigid ways of being?
What makes Urania remarkable is that it approached those questions not with despair but imagination. And perhaps that imagination explains why Eva Gore-Booth herself became so easy to sideline historically. As Tiernan notes, her relationship with Esther Roper was frequently flattened by earlier scholars into the safer language of friendship.
“Partly, she was overlooked because she was overshadowed by her older sister Markievicz,” Tiernan says. “But ultimately, I place much of the blame on homophobic embarrassment.”
That embarrassment shaped Irish historical memory for generations. Queer relationships were softened, hidden or rendered ambiguous. Radical ideas became footnotes. Intellectual networks disappeared from public consciousness altogether.
When Tiernan began researching Gore-Booth, she discovered just how scattered and neglected the archive had become. “There was, in fact, very little known about her,” she says. “It took years of research to source her personal papers, unpublished writings and other details.”
What has emerged through that recovery is not simply a forgotten suffragist, but a profoundly original Irish thinker whose work reached far beyond conventional political reform. And at the centre of that rediscovery sits Urania, an eccentric utopia still startlingly alive.
There is something deeply comforting in knowing that people like Eva Gore-Booth, Esther Roper and Irene Clyde existed when they did. Not because they provide perfect blueprints for contemporary politics, nor because their ideas map neatly onto modern language, but because they remind us that queer history has never been only a history of suffering. It is also a history of creativity. Of intellectual risk. Of friendship networks and private journals and strange, ambitious dreams about how the world might be reorganised. The contributors to Urania believed queer individuals could live more freely than society allowed them to imagine. More than a century later, their journal still carries that sense of possibility.