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.
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...
Family and Intimate relationships
Maud Gonne
MG
first met the poet William Butler Yeats
, and he fell in love with her at first sight. Her continuing role in his imaginative life remains for many people the single fact known about...
Textual Production
Maud Gonne
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/.
politics
Maud Gonne
Concern over her health enabled her to transfer to a nursing home in London; she eluded surveillance dressed in the uniform of a Red Cross nurse, and slipped home to Dublin, where Yeats
and his...
Friends, Associates
Maud Gonne
Yeats
refused to let MG
into her own house, where his young and pregnant wife
had succumbed to the dreaded flu epidemic. This caused a serious quarrel between him and Gonne, and she denounced him...
Textual Production
Maud Gonne
MG
's correspondence with Yeats
was collected and edited by A. Norman Jeffares
and Anna MacBride White
, 1992, and that with New York lawyer John Quinn
in a volume entitled Too Long a Sacrifice...
Author summary
Eva Gore-Booth
In addition to her intense suffrage and labour activism, EGB
wrote poetry, periodical essays, political pamphlets, religious criticism, plays, and an autobiograpical sketch. Her work was admired by her contemporaries Katharine Tynan
, Æ (...
Literary responses
Eva Gore-Booth
The volume was well-received by EGB
's contemporaries. W. B. Yeats
wrote to her: I think it is full of poetic feeling and has great promise. . . . Weariness is really most imaginative and...
Textual Features
Eva Gore-Booth
W. B. Yeats
claimed a central influence on EGB
's understanding of Celtic legend, though she was already thinking about it to a degree during her adolescence. In a letter to novelist Olivia Shakespear
...
Fictionalization
Eva Gore-Booth
W. B. Yeats
(who first met the Gore-Booth family in about 1894, and associated with Eva and her sister Constance Markievicz
for the rest of their lives)
Haverty, Anne. Constance Markievicz: An Independent Life. Pandora.
