Annie M. P. Smithson

Annie Mary Patricia Smithson (26 September 1873 – 21 February 1948) was an Irish novelist, poet and Nationalist.

Background and career Smithson was born into a Protestant family in Sandymount, Dublin. She was christened Margaret Anne Jane, but took the names Anne Mary Patricia on her conversion to Catholicism. 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. Smithson disliked her stepfather and referred to him always as Mr. Longshaw. 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, Co. Down. There she fell in love with her colleague Dr. James Manton, a married man. 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 became a member of Cumann na mBan and campaigned for Sinn Féin in the 1918 general election.

She took the Republican side in the Irish Civil War and nursed participants in the siege at Moran's Hotel.

She was Secretary and Organiser of the Irish Nurses Organisation from 1929 to 1942.

From 1932 onward, she shared a house in Rathmines, Dublin with her stepsister and her stepsister's family. The White Owl (1937) Margaret of Fair Hill (1939) The Wicklow Heather (1939) The Weldons of Tibradden (1940) By Shadowed Ways (1942) Tangled Threads (1943) Paid in Full (1946)

Autobiography