Yeats's Ghosts

by Maddox, Brenda

• ISBN13: 9780060985042
• ISBN10: 0060985046
• Format: Paperback
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publications

Summary

William Butter Yeats, who some critics feel was the greatest English language poet of our century, led a life of many contradictions. He was Ireland's most revered writer and won the Nobel Prize for Literature. But in his private life, Yeats struggled with passionate, if unrequited, relationships with women and was haunted by the spirits of his ancestors. Renowned biographer Brenda Maddox examines the poet's life through the prism of his personal obsession with the supernatural and otherworldly. She considers for the first time the Automatic Script, the trancelike communication with supposed spirits that he and his much younger wife. Georgie, conducted during the early years of their marriage. Writing with edge, wit, and energy, she finds the essential clues to Yeats's life and work in his unusual relationships with women, most particularly Maude and Iseult Gonne, his wife Georgie, and his rarely discussed mother.

Author Biography

Brenda Maddox's work has been translated into ten languages. Former Home Affairs editor of the Economist and media columnist for the London Daily Telegraph and the Times, she is a contributor to the New York Times Book Review, a regular reviewer for the London Observer and Literary Review, and frequent broadcaster on the BBC. Her 1988 biography of James Joyce's wife, Nora, won the Los Angeles Times Award for biography, the British Silver P.E.N. Award for nonfiction, and the French Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger and was nominated for the National Book Award. Her 1994 biography of D. H. Lawrence won the Whitbread Biography Award and was nominated for the Critic's Circle Award.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	vii
Introduction	xi
Part 1
An Astrological Deadline (January--March 1917)	3	(21)
Counting (March--May 1917)	24	(17)
Mother or Daughter (August--September 1917)	41	(16)
Part 2
Soror and Frater (October 1917)	57	(16)
Folie a Deux (November--December 1917)	73	(21)
An Adventure (January--March 1918)	94	(14)
What Rough Beast? (March 1918--February 1919)	108	(27)
Only One More (March 1919--May 1920)	135	(28)
Waiting for J.B. (May 1920--July 1922)	163	(26)
Part 3
The Silent Woman (1865--1900)	189	(26)
Part 4
Politics and Potency (1922--1928)	215	(36)
Politics and Potency, Con't. (1928--1934)	251	(26)
``This Is Baghdad'' (April 1934--December 1935)	277	(26)
O My Dears (January 1936--March 1937)	303	(27)
Such Friends (April 1937--January 1938)	330	(22)
A Working Year (January 1938--January 28, 1939)	352	(31)
Epilogue: Laid to Rest?	383	(14)
Abbreviations and Short Forms	397	(4)
Notes and Sources	401	(46)
Bibliography	447	(14)
Index	461