on some foreign theme would not". But Augusta Gregory, with whom Yeats had established the ILT, was entirely dismissive. She found the language of the long soliloquies "intolerable" and the overall effect "tawdry". National credo In 1905 the Cork National Players performed Milligan's “The Daughter of Donagh”. The melodrama (which the ILT's successor, the Abbey Theatre had rejected) is based on her unpublished 1893 novel, "The Cromwellians". Characteristically for Milligan it combines the theme of Irish dispossession with a transgressive relationship: between a Cromwellian soldier and the daughter of the Irish family on which he has been quartered. Milligan was unapologetic about the continuous nationalist thread in her writing. In 1893 she had written that Irish art could not exist "in some quiet paradise apart" but only "within the noisy field of political warfare". Invoking the memory of Young Ireland, Milligan criticised those in the Literary Revival who "proceeded on purely literary lines" and "lacked the national spirit that had fired the country in [18]48". Later years On the eve of the Great War Milligan was living in Dublin with her younger brother William and his family. They collaborated on two works of fiction, an Irish-Norse saga Sons of the Sea King. and The Dynamite Drummer (an American tourist comments on the grim determination of Ulster Protestants in opposing Home Rule "not to rule themselves"). With the outbreak of war, William volunteered and when discharged by the British Army suffered from what might today be recognised as Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Late in 1921 he received notice that, as a former British officer, he had 24 hours to quit Dublin or be shot. Who sanctioned the republican order was not established. Leaving her business, an Irish bookshop in Dawson Street, and all her possessions, Milligan fled with her brother first to Belfast and then to England. Milligan and her brother returned to Tyrone in what was now Unionist-controlled Northern Ireland in the 1931. She lived with William, who had secured a minor civil-service position, his wife and paralysed son in the village of Drumragh outside Omagh. Her nephew, of whom she was very fond, died in 1934 aged only 26. William died three years later. Hindered by the regular interception of mail, and obliged to report daily to a police barracks, Milligan described herself to Áine Ceannt as an "interned prisoner". She spoke of the "hostile" "un-Irish" atmosphere of the