Born in 1868, Constance could have settled for the life of a fashionable London lady, but she decided to use her aristocratic influence to fight for justice and equality for the poor, women, and the Irish nationalist cause.
Her conscience was pricked by seeing hungry tenants evicted from their homes in the west of Ireland because they could not pay their rent. She helped supply food to them, and later joined the suffragette movement.
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She was the first woman elected to the British parliament, but in common with other Sinn Fein members refused to take her seat in Westminster, becoming instead labour minister in the independent government set up in Dublin.
This was opposed by London, and she was jailed again.
She fought for the republicans in the Irish civil war, joined Fianna Fail, the political party founded by Eamon De Valera in 1926, and was elected again to the Dail, the Irish parliament, in 1927, the year she died.
Josslyn Gore-Booth, the present owner of Lissadell, is the grandson of Countess Markiewicz's brother, also called Josslyn.
His decision to sell has prompted calls for government intervention.
Arthur Morgan, a Sinn Fein member of the Irish parliament, called for the house to be preserved as a "monument to the heroine of the 1916 Rising".
"Sinn Fein believes that it is time for the state to examine the options for reappropriating hereditary estates which are a legacy of our colonial past and have no place in a modern Ireland," he said.
Maura McTighe of the Yeats Society said she would be devastated if the house were destroyed or redeveloped.
"Too much of Ireland has gone into golf courses for Americans," she said.
Rosie Cowan The Guardian UK May 27
