Product Description

Ann Saddlemyer's biography of W. B. Yeats's wife, George, portrays an extraordinarily talented, intelligent, and self-effacing woman, whose creative influence has never before been fully understood. She was wife and manager of a famous poet, and mother to his children, but in her own right also an inspired visionary and a practical woman of the arts. Georgie Hyde Lees was raised in London's literary salons, where arts, anthroposophy and the occult met. An accomplished linguist, art student and literary scholar, she married W. B. Yeats when she was 25, and he 52. Her supernatural "automatic writing" became the inspiration of Yeats's poetry and thought for the last 20 years of his life, yet she always concealed the depth of their collaboration. Close friend of many writers and poets, among them Frank O'Connor and Ezra Pound, she spent her long widowhood steering the "Yeats industry" and actively assisting younger scholars and writers. For the first time, this intelligent and creative woman is allowed to take center 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 Drawing on memoirs and a wealth of unknown and unpublished sources, this biography by the distinguished scholar Ann Saddlemyer reveals someone much more significant than just '"Mrs.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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1579179 in Books
• Published on: 2002-09-26
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 760 pages

Review
"A profound, exhaustive, and richly evocative life of this truly remarkable woman.... The product, surely, of a lifetime of study." -- John Banville, The New York Review of Books

"In Saddlemyer, George Yeats has found a biographer perfectly suited to her.... A delight to read: authoritative, sympathetic and insightful." -- The San Francisco Chronicle

"Saddlemyer has at last delivered the life of this remarkable woman in encyclopaedic detail." -- Brenda Maddox, The Guardian

"Saddlemyer's wise, majestic biography...is a masterpiece, an extraordinary achievement." -- The Globe and Mail [Toronto]

Review

"Majestic.... In Saddlemyer, George Yeats has found a biographer perfectly suited to her.... Steeped in its subject, [the book] also provides an excellent, detailed portrait of the poet's life in his last two decades, far better than Yeats' own biographers have done. Becoming George is a delight to read: authoritative, sympathetic and insightful, it stands as a refreshing contrast to the overheated 'Yeats's Ghosts' (1999).... This is good, straightforward, old-fashioned biography, packed with information and useful for the Yeats aficionado and the novice reader alike."--Martin Rubin, The San Francisco Chronicle
"Ann Saddlemyer has written a profound, exhaustive, and richly evocative life of this truly remarkable woman.... In drawing her subject forward into the light Saddlemyer has exercised an admirable discretion and sense of balance along with an almost fierce devotion to the facts. Becoming George is...the product, surely, of a lifetime of study and thought and discrimination. As a young scholar...Saddlemyer came to know George Yeats, and was a good friend of her daughter Anne, and the warmth of affection for George and the Yeats family permeates the book and brings it to life."--John Banville, The New York Review of Books
"Saddlemyer has at last delivered the life of this remarkable woman in encyclopaedic detail.... Saddlemyer is gratifyingly frank in discussing Georgie's psychological make-up."--Brenda Maddox, The Guardian
"Saddlemyer's wise, majestic biography...is a masterpiece, an extraordinary achievement."--The Globe and Mail
"Advanced reader will appreciate the copious endnotes and a view of a side Yeats absent from other biographies"--Choice

About the Author

Ann Saddlemyer is Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto. She is one of the General Editors of the Cornell Yeats series (publishing the MSS of the entire Yeats canon); and on the editorial boards of the Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, the Irish Studies Review, the Irish University Review, the Correspondence of Bernard Shaw, and the Shaw Annual; and co-founder of the journal Theatre Research in Canada. She was awarded the British Academy's Rose Mary Crawshay Award for Criticism for her Collected Letters of John Millington Synge (OUP).