Book Excerpt: Kathleen Lynn - doctor, revolutionary and lover

Emma Donoghue has written this foreword to a new edition of the diaries of the astonishing Kathleen Lynn

Kathleen Lynn: "a revolutionary — of the socialist, suffragist, anti-imperialist, or hard-core Irish Republican kind"

My Kathleen Lynn may not be the same as yours. That’s all right — hers was a broad church.

My Kathleen Lynn is at least partly fictional. I’ve been asked to introduce this volume because she features as a central character in my 2020 novel set in a Dublin hospital’s maternity/fever unit during the Great Flu, The Pull of the Stars.