She was the flamboyant figure of the Irish freedom struggle: Maud Gonne, very tall, very glamorous, and very headstrong. Born in 1866 as the daughter of an English officer, she loved Ireland and hated the British Empire. For the oppressed, she was the "Woman of the Fairies," who worked wonders; for her enemies, an "uncontrollable revolutionary." She fought alongside tenant farmers against the landlords' troops, advocated for republican prisoners, served time in prison herself, and founded Ireland's first political women's organization. Unmissable and unmistakable, she challenged the colonial power and risked a bullet or a blow from a rifle butt at any moment. She was the great love of the poet and Nobel laureate W. B. Yeats—and she led a secret double life in Paris as the mistress of a right-wing politician and the mother of a daughter.