Iseult

Authors

  • A. Norman Jeffares

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.37389/abei.v7i1.184198

Abstract

Who, you may well ask, was this woman who, within the three years between 1917 and 1920, had the experience of being proposed to by W. B. Yeats, seduced by Ezra Pound, pursued by Lennox Robinson and married to Francis Stuart? In the process of editing her letters to W. B. Yeats and Ezra Pound with her granddaughter Christina Bridgwater and her mother’s granddaughter Anna MacBride White, I have had to form a picture of her life for myself, not yet complete, for there is still much to read, to discover. This essay is, then, a progress report upon one aspect of her life, her relationship with W. B. Yeats, founded upon his letters, upon her letters to him, her journals in French and English and her literary work, published and unpublished. It will give an account of her childhood, her becoming a young woman, her two years in London, and the part Yeats played in the early days of her marriage. 

Author Biography

  • A. Norman Jeffares

    Professor A. NORMAN JEFFARES (1920-2005) was renowned for his work on Yeats, and published widely on Irish, English, American, and other Anglophone literatures. His voluminous work on Yeats included Commentaries on the Collected Poems (1968), and the Collected Plays (1975) (with A.S. Knowland); W.B. Yeats: The Critical Heritage (1977) and A New Commentary on the Collected Poems (1984); his comprehensive edition of Yeats’s Collected Poems (1989) followed by a welcome, annotated, edition of Yeats’s first version of A Vision. He also edited various collections of criticism on Yeats, including In Excited Reverie (1965) with K.G. Cross. He lectured throughout the world, at universities in Groningen, Edinburgh, Adelaide, Leeds, and. Stirling. He held many posts during his career, with such organisations as PEN Scotland (chairman), the Scottish Arts Council, the Arts Council of Great Britain, the Royal Society of Literature, and the Australian Academy of the Humanities. He was Honorary Fellow of Trinity College Dublin, and honorary Doctor of the Universities of Stirling and Lille. Among his many influential publications are his pioneering ‘popular’ history of Anglo-Irish Literature (1982); A Pocket History of Irish Literature (1997); his anthology of Irish Love Poems (1997); Ireland’s love poems: Wonder and Wild Desire (2000). Images of Invention (1996), Smythe’s publication of twenty-two essays Professor Jeffares had written over the last two decades; A Pocket History of Irish Literature; The Poems and Plays of Oliver St John Gogarty (2001); W.B. Yeats. Man and Poet(1996); Letters to W.B. Yeats and Ezra Pound from Iseult Gonne. A girl that knew all Dante once (2004), co-edited with Anna MacBride White and Christina Bridgwater; and countless others. He was the general editor of various series of texts, of A Review of English Literature, of the influential Writers and Critics series of monographs, and of the York Notes. He edited the journals AREL and ARIEL. In recent years he had been co-editing a four volume anthology of Irish Literature from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He founded IASIL, and organised its inauguralconference in 1970, and has been a major influence on the development of the Association since that time. (from obituaries written by Peter van de Kamp, O’Dwyer Riana and Christopher Rush). 

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Published

2005-06-30

Issue

Vol. 7 (2005): ABEI Journal 7

Section

Biography

License

Copyright (c) 2005 A. Norman Jeffares

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

How to Cite

Jeffares, A. N. . (2005). Iseult. ABEI Journal, 7(1), 11-22. https://doi.org/10.37389/abei.v7i1.184198