in Derry. It is here that she first became interested in Irish, the once majority language that as a child she had heard spoken only by farm hands. In 1891 she took a further position in Dublin. Unable, until the formation in 1893 of the Gaelic League, to find any school or group to teach Irish, she took lessons privately, while reading Irish literature and history in the National Library. Milligan's command of Irish was never fluent, and on that basis Patrick Pearse was to object when, in 1904, the Gaelic League hired her as a travelling lecturer. With the help of costumed tableaux vivants evoking Irish historical or literary subjects (a skill she first acquired when commissioned to assist with the Irish exhibit at the 1893 Chicago World Fair), Milligan proved herself by establishing new branches throughout Ireland and raising funds along the way. In the north, in Ulster, she focused on the more difficult task of recruiting Protestants, working with, among other activists, League president Douglas Hyde, Ada McNeill, Roger Casement, Stephen Gwynn, and Seamus McManus. Political development A Royal Democrat In Dublin Milligan was witness both to the first stirrings of the Irish cultural renaissance and to the last act in the political career of Charles Stewart Parnell. In June 1891 she saw the beleaguered leader of Irish nationalism at a public meeting "beaten and ashamed" by the furore created by his being named in a divorce case (his affair with Kitty O'Shea). In the poem "At Maynooth" she scathingly contrasts the private life of George V, in 1911 rapturously received at the Catholic seminary by Cardinal Logue, to that of the man once hailed as Ireland's "uncrowned King". Fascinated by Parnell and his non-denominational nationalism, Milligan followed his appearances across the city, sketching him as she went. This, she conceded, represented a sea-change in her political consciousness. Until then she described herself (despite her father's relative liberalism) as still very much a product of a "Tory and Protestant" upbringing, blinded to the literature and history of her native land by her formal education. In May 1891 she noted in her diary: "While in the tram going up O’Connell Street I turned into a Parnellite." Writing as "Iris Olkyrn", Milligan's first novel, published the year before Parnell's death in October 1891, A Royal Democrat, had been a neo-Jacobite tale of a future Prince of Wales who, born