Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
W. B. Yeats
-
Standard Name: Yeats, W. B.
Used Form: William Butler Yeats
Used Form: Willie Yeats
WBY
, who began publishing well before the end of the nineteenth century, is regarded as one of the most important twentieth-century poets in English, and one of the most international of Irish writers. He was early involved in the Irish Literary Revival, and wrote early, highly romantic lyrics on Celtic and fairy themes. Later he made poetry out of the search for a poetic language. Some of his later work is affected by his interest in the occult.
The United Irishman published the text of MG
's own play, Dawn, A Play in One Act and Three Tableaux, about the Great Famine of the 1840s, two years after she appeared in the...
Textual Production
Maud Gonne
This is the date of the earliest remaining letter of the correspondence between MG
and W. B. Yeats
, which they maintained until his death on 28 January 1939.
Gonne, Maud, and W. B. Yeats. The Gonne–Yeats Letters 1893–1938. Editors White, Anna MacBride and A. Norman Jeffares, Hutchinson.
49, 453
Textual Production
Maud Gonne
Gonne
kept safe the letter that Yeats
wrote her on this date, noting it as the last letter from W. B. Y..
Gonne, Maud, and W. B. Yeats. The Gonne–Yeats Letters 1893–1938. Editors White, Anna MacBride and A. Norman Jeffares, Hutchinson.
x
Textual Production
Maud Gonne
MG
published her ironically-titled autobiography, A Servant of the Queen. The queen here is not the British monarch, but Cathleen Ni Houlihan the mythological queen and personification of Ireland, whom MG
played in...
politics
Maud Gonne
Since [n]one of the parties in Ireland want women, MG
said, I have to work all by my lone, till I can form a woman's organization. First, with help from W. B. Yeats
Occupation
Maud Gonne
MG
played the heroine in Augusta Gregory
's and Yeats
's Cathleen ni Houlihan in the Irish National Theatre
's production, opening on 2 April 1902. This role made her a symbol of the nation.
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford.
McGuire, James, and James Quinn, editors. Dictionary of Irish Biography. http://dib.cambridge.org/.
Cultural formation
Elinor Glyn
During the late 1920s and early 30s, EG
was caught up in the wave of Spiritualism (the belief that the living can contact the dead through mediums) that had been gaining ground in England particularly...
Textual Production
Elinor Glyn
In October 1915 EG
published a collection of articles on truth, common sense, and happiness under the title Three Things (which was used for a very different text by W. B. Yeats
in 1929). She...
Most of these stories inhabit JG
's familiar territory among suburban women of a certain age, but other protagonists are very different: a dirty old tramp, a reluctant male homosexual, and, in the title story...
Writing in 1892, William Butler Yeats
said that Callirrhoë possessed imagination and fancy in plenty
Yeats, W. B. Uncollected Prose by W.B. Yeats. Editors Frayne, John P. and Colton Johnson, Columbia University Press.
227
—setting itself apart from some of MF
's later publications, which he considered to be much less successful.
Literary responses
Michael Field
Writing in The Bookman, William Butler Yeats
called this collection suggestive and thoroughly unsatisfactory.
Yeats, W. B. Uncollected Prose by W.B. Yeats. Editors Frayne, John P. and Colton Johnson, Columbia University Press.
225
He questioned Field's poetic approach. They have poetic feeling and imagination in abundance, he wrote, and yet they have...
Publishing
Michael Field
The second of these was the play which had not only appeared alone in print but had also been staged, in October 1893. A decade after that, in 1903, William Butler Yeats
had turned down...
Anthologization
Michael Field
The Poetry Bookshop
issued A Selection From the Poems of Michael Field in 1923, bringing together pieces from their published poetry collections and plays, such as Underneath the Bough, Callirrhoë; Fair Rosamund, Wild...
