Maud Gonne is part of Irish history: her founding of the Daughters of Ireland, in 1900, was the key that effectively opened the door of twentieth-century politics to Irish women. Still remembered in Ireland for the inspiring public speeches she made on behalf of the suffering--those evicted from their homes in western Ireland, the Treason-Felony prisoners on the Isle of Wright, indeed all those whom she saw as victims of imperialism--she is known, too, within and outside Ireland as the woman W. B. Yeats loved and celebrated in his poems.

It is harsh exercise to put into cold print and to bare all the faults of such subjective things as letters written in great haste in the middle of a busy active life, and it requires the kindness and tolerance of the reader. Nuances in the handwriting, or insertion of omitted words and afterthoughts, or positioning of postscripts, are all lost in printing; while irregularities in spelling, punctuation, abbreviations and repetitious phrases are exaggerated. The few of Yeat s letters to Maud Gonne that have survived were scattered through old bundles of correspondence. The only two kept particularly safe were together in an envelope, one marked last letter from W. B. Y. which was written on 16 June 1938 from Steyning, Sussex, and the other a letter concerning the death of William Sharp which he had asked her to keep safely and which she must have put in a separate place, and so it survived. The letters he received from her before her marriage of 10 and 24 February 1903, had been very crumpled as if carried around in his pocket and reread many times, then smoothed out to be put away with the others."

This is a new release of the original 1923 edition.

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Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone!

Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone!