Annie M. P. Smithson

Who was Annie M. P. Smithson?

Annie Mary Patricia Smithson was an Irish novelist, poet and Nationalist.

Smithson was born into a Protestant family in Sandymount, Dublin. She was christened Margaret Anne Jane, but 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. In 1901 she took up a post as district nurse in Millton, Co. Down. There she fell in love with her colleague Dr James Manton, a married man. Deciding that a relationship was impossible, she left Millton in 1906. They kept up a correspondence until her conversion, when she burnt his letters.

She converted to Catholicism in March 1907 and became a fervent Republican and Nationalist.