Annie Mary Patricia Smithson was an Irish novelist, poet and Nationalist.
Background
Smithson was born into a Protestant family in Sandymount, Dublin. Her mother and father were first cousins and her father died when she was young. About 1881 her mother married her second husband, Peter Longshaw, who owned a chemical factory in Warrington in Lancashire.
Career
There were five children of the second marriage. Smithson abandoned her ambition to become a journalist in order to train as a nurse and a midwife. She trained in London and Edinburgh, before returning to Dublin in 1900.
In 1901 she took up a post as district nurse in Millton, Company
Down. Deciding that a relationship was impossible, she left Millton in 1906. They kept up a correspondence until her conversion, when she burnt his letters.
She took the Republican side in the Irish Civil War and nursed participants in the siege at Moran"s Hotel. In 1922 she was imprisoned by Free State forces and was rescued from Mullingar prison by Linda Kearns McWhinney and Muriel MacSwiney, posing as a Red Cross delegation.
In 1924 she wrote a series of articles on child welfare work for the Evening Mail newspaper, based on her work in tenements in the Dublin Liberties, one of the poorest areas of the city, where she continued to work until 1929.
She was Secretary and Organiser of the Irish Nurses Organisation from 1929 to 1942. She wrote for the Irish Nurses" Magazine and edited the Irish Nurses Union Gazette. In 1917 she published her first novel, Her Irish Heritage, which became a best-seller.
lieutenant was dedicated to those who died in the Easter Rising of 1916.
In all, she published twenty novels and two short story collections. Other successful novels included By Strange Paths and The Walk of a Queen.
In 1944 she published her autobiography, Myself - and Others. She died of heart failure at 12 Richmond Hill, Dublin and was buried in Whitechurch, County Dublin.
Her novels feature in Brian Friel"s Dancing at Lughnasa.
Smithson, Annie M. P. (1944). Myself—And Others. Dublin: The Talbot Press Limited.
Politics
Her political views led to her resignation from the Queen"s Nurses Committee and a move into private nursing
Membership
She became a member of Cumann na mBan and campaigned for Sinn Féin in the 1918 general election.