A Djinn speaks
Colm Tóibín: What about George Yeats?, 20 February 2003
Becoming George: The Life of Mrs W.B. Yeats
by Ann Saddlemyer.
Oxford, 808 pp., £25, September 2002,0 19 811232 7 Show More
by Ann Saddlemyer.
Oxford, 808 pp., £25, September 2002,
“... In 1979, in a preface to a new edition of Yeats: The Man and the Masks, Richard Ellmann wrote about 46 Palmerston Road in Rathmines in Dublin, where George Yeats lived between her husband’s death in 1939 and her own death almost thirty years later. Mrs Yeats lived, Ellmann wrote, among the dead poet’s papers. ‘There in the bookcases was his working library, often heavily annotated, and in cabinets and file cases were all his manuscripts, arranged with care … She was very good at turning up at once some early draft of a poem or play or prose work, or a letter Yeats had received or written ... ”