Tangled Threads

First edition, fifth printing hardcover in red cloth covered boards with black lettering to spine. Corners bumped. Spine ends crushed. Plenty of edge wear and staining. This copy is stamped "Torch Library" on the title page and "Please keep book clean" on page five. Pages are toned throughout. No pen marks or inscriptions. Please see all seller photos. Smithson was born into a Protestant family in Sandymount, Dublin. She 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.She converted to Catholicism in March 1907 and became a fervent Republican and Nationalist. 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. In 1922 she was imprisoned by Free State forces. 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. In 1917 she published her first novel, Her Irish Heritage, which became a best-seller. It was dedicated to those who died in the Easter Rising of 1916. In all, she published twenty novels and two short story collections. In 1944 she published her autobiography, Myself – and Others. From 1932 onwards she shared a house in Rathmines, Dublin with her stepsister and her stepsister's family. She died of heart failure at 12 Richmond Hill, Rathmines, Dublin and was buried in Whitechurch, Rathfarnham, Co. Dublin.…