Emily Lawless was a novelist, historian and poet. Her father was a wealthy landlord, and succeeded as the 3rd Baron Cloncurry when Emily was a child, so she developed an early awareness of the land disputes so prominent in the Irish political life of the time. From a young age she was a keen horse rider and swimmer, and an interest in the natural sciences was nourished by her love of the outdoors and by a childhood spent in Kildare, and at her mother's family home near Tuam, Co. Galway. She began writing fiction in the early 1880s and it was her third novel, Hurrish (1886), that brought her to the attention of British readers. Lawless's background meant that her perspective was a unionist one, and she was criticised in the nationalist press for what they deemed her exaggerated view of peasant violence. From the late 1880s she was increasingly based in London, but remained closely interested in Irish material and adhered to her conviction that England's treatment of Ireland was at least partly to blame for the rise of nationalism there. Though her publications continued to be influential in both countries, she did not support the idea of political roles for women and opposed the campaign for women's suffrage. She was acquainted with Yeats, but they were not in agreement on artistic matters, as Lawless thought aesthetic considerations to be subordinate to social responsibility. Her first volume of poems, Atlantic Rhymes and Rhythms (1898), was reissued under the title With the Wild Geese (1902) and became her best-known collection. Among her finest poems are the tightly wrought historical narratives of this period, where her control of voice is particularly striking. Her ability to disrupt the expectations of readers through unusual perspectives on human motivation emerges both at this time and later. A Point of View (1909) and the unfinished The Inalienable Heritage, published a year after her death, feature lyric meditations on moral and social issues, many of which choose the natural world as a creative framework.