This biography is republished from The Dictionary of Irish Biography and was written by Lawrence William White and Patrick Long. Shared by permission in line with Creative Commons ‘Attribution’ (CC BY) licencing.
Born: 18 December 1884, Ireland
Died: 9 July 1917
Country most active: Ireland
Also known as: Muriel Enid Gifford MacDonagh
Muriel Enid Gifford MacDonagh (1884–1917), was born 18 December 1884 at 12 Cowper Road, Rathmines. Educated at Alexandra College, she trained briefly in England as a poultry instructor. She then trained as a student nurse in Sir Patrick Dun’s Hospital, Dublin, until her health broke down from the rigours of the work. She was active alongside her sisters in both the Women’s Franchise League and the nationalist organisation Inghinidhe na hÉireann, assisting in the two bodies’ school meals programme of 1910–11; at a 1914 Women’s Franchise League fundraiser she appeared as Maeve, the Warrior Queen, in a tableau vivant. The most domesticated and least ardently feminist of the Gifford sisters, highly attentive to her grooming and appearance, she delighted in inviting home impecunious artists and activists for a ‘proper meal’. Shy and reserved, the quiet presence in a family of rabid talkers, she had a gentle and sweet disposition. On a visit to St Enda’s school with Grace and Sydney in 1908, she was introduced to teacher, poet, and nationalist Thomas MacDonagh by the suffragette journalist Mrs N. F. Dryhurst, who coyly advised MacDonagh to ‘fall in love with one of these girls and marry her’, to which he laughingly replied: ‘That would be easy; the only difficulty would be to decide which one’ (Parks, 26). In the event, MacDonagh and the Gifford sisters were casual friends until autumn 1911, when he and Muriel had an intense and rapid courtship, meeting surreptitiously in museums and galleries owing to the religious biases of relatives, and corresponding copiously. After MacDonagh’s appointment to a UCD assistant lectureship in December 1911, they married on 3 January 1912. They had a son, Donagh MacDonagh (b. November 1912), and a daughter, Barbara MacDonagh Redmond (b. March 1915). They resided at 32 Baggot St., before moving to 29 Oakley Road, Rathmines.
Continuing to suffer from poor physical health and depression, Muriel was subject to periodic periods of confinement and convalescence. She was unable to see MacDonagh between his arrest following the Easter rebellion and his execution on 3 May 1916, a fact that increased the intensity of her bereavement. Emotionally devastated, estranged from her parents owing to their disapproval of her husband’s involvement in the rising, she lived briefly with the Plunketts at Larkfield, Kimmage, and with MacDonagh’s relatives in Thurles, Co. Tipperary, before residing in Dublin at 50 Marlborough Road, a Plunkett family property. Left nearly destitute with two young children, she was assisted by the Irish Volunteers Dependents’ Fund, of which she was an officer and committee member. Named in MacDonagh’s will as a literary executor, she assisted in the preparation of a collected edition of his poetry, published in October 1916. Owing to the demand for writings of the executed leaders of the rising, the volume sold well in Ireland and abroad (as did another posthumous publication, Literature in Ireland (1916)), thereby alleviating somewhat her financial distress. At Easter 1917 Muriel was received into the Roman catholic church. While holidaying in Skerries, Co. Dublin, with other 1916 widows, she drowned while swimming alone in the sea, presumably attempting to reach an offshore island (9 July 1917). With public interest in the 1916 widows and their families already stimulated as a major focus of separatist propaganda in the immediate aftermath of the rising, her funeral to Glasnevin cemetery was attended by an immense crowd of mourners.