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Becoming George - The Life of Mrs W. B. Yeats (Paperback, New Ed)
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Becoming George - The Life of Mrs W. B. Yeats (Paperback, New Ed)
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'I, the poet William Yeats, | With old mill boards and sea-green
slates, | And smithy work from the Gort forge, | Restored this
tower for my wife George; | And may these characters remain | When
all is ruin once again.' With this lovely six-line poem, W. B.
Yeats dedicated the renovation of Thoor Ballylee to his wife. But
the poem's truth conceals another, and different truth - that they
worked together at the restoration, and it was largely her vision
and hands that created a dwelling from the former ruins. Just how
symbolic this is, of the close but largely hidden collaboration
between them, is revealed by this deeply-researched life of George
Yeats - the first full-scale biography of a woman of remarkable
gifts and generous self-concealment. Raised in the decades before
the First War, in London literary salons where the arts and occult
met, Georgie Hyde Lees became an art student, accomplished
linguist, and serious scholar of medieval arcana, anthroposophy,
and astrology. She was a lifelong friend of Ezra Pound and his wife
Dorothy Shakespear, in whose social circle Yeats also moved; he
sponsored her initiation to the Order of the Golden Dawn. In 1917
they married (she was 25, he 52), and on their honeymoon Georgie
began the automatic writing which formed the substance of A Vision,
and from which sprang the ideas that occupied Yeats for the rest of
his life. Her 'extrasensory' perceptions fed his poetic imagery as
her practicality and warmth supplied the environment for his
writing. As with the restoration of Ballylee, they were intimate
collaborators - but her instinct was always for self-effacement.
Though valued by numerous writer-friends (among them Lennox
Robinson, Thomas McGreevy, and Frank O'Connor) as a perceptive
critic - and known to have written two plays and a novel, which she
suppressed - she deliberately hid her talents from public view. Her
choice was to appear as Yeats's wife, helpmeet, and secretary, the
mother of his children - and for thirty years after his death the
tireless overseer of his literary legacy and a knowledgeable
adviser to generations of younger critics and writers. For the
first time, this intelligent and creative woman is allowed to take
centre stage. Drawing on memoirs and a wealth of unknown and
unpublished sources, this biography by the distinguished scholar
Ann Saddlemyer reveals someone much more significant than just 'Mrs
W. B. Yeats' - a personality at once visionary and practical, and
an important figure in twentieth-century literary history.
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