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 The melodrama (which the ILT's successor, the Abbey Theatre had rejected) is based on her unpublished 1893 novel, "The Cromwellians".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.