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Collected Letters of Lady Charlotte Fitzgerald

From the Introduction to the Collected Letters of Lady Charlotte Fitzgerald (1888-1971) by Alan Fitzgerald, grandson of Lady Charlotte's brother David

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In January 1911, Charlotte's father, Lord Ballincarron, died. The title passed to her younger brother David, who preferred the life of London to rural Ireland. Accordingly, he made over the family house in Limerick to his sister, together with sufficient money to maintain it and to keep her in a 'suitable' style. From there she began her extraordinary correspondence with prominent figures in the arts, literature, politics and science. No one of note seems to have escaped her attention. In her personal archive are copies of letters (and often replies) to George Bernard Shaw, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Rosa Luxembourg, Tom Mann, all three Pankhursts, Charlotte Despard, Eugene Debs, James Connolly, Lorenzo Portet, Emma Goldman, Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, Carl Sandburg, Vachel Lindsay, Marianne Moore, Winston Churchill, Herbert Asquith, George Askwith, Albert Schweitzer and many others.

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She did not however limit her activities to correspondence. She was a member of the WSPU even before her move to Ireland and remained closely linked with Sylvia Pankhurst and her Women's Suffrage Federation. On settling in Limerick in 1910 she quickly joined the Irish Women's Franchise League and later became an active member of the Irish Women Workers' Union. She was closely associated with most of the key figures of the Irish Left, working tirelessly to bring together the three strands of socialism, women's suffrage and Irish Independence. Indeed, without her involvement it is unlikely that Ireland would have escaped the shift to the right that was such a dramatic feature of English politics in the 1920s and 30s.