The Gonne-Yeats Letters: 1893-1938.

This is the complete surviving correspondence between the Irish patriot and stunningly beautiful Maud Gonne and William Butler Yeats. Their often-stormy relationship provided Yeats with the great passion of his life and the inspiration for much of his poetry. Gonne found in Yeats her best friend, supporter, defender, and her "spiritual husband."

One of the many tragedies of the Irish Civil War was the destruction of most of Yeats's letters to Gonne before 1923. Irish Free State soldiers who supported the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 raided Gonne's home, took many of Yeats's letters, and later burned them. Others Gonne did not keep for fear of reprisals since they contained material about her political activities. This volume, edited and with introductions by Anna MacBride White, Gonne's granddaughter, and A. Norman Jeffares, gives us the correspondence with clear end notes and valuable commentary throughout.

"Beloved," Gonne wrote to Yeats in 1908, "I am glad and proud beyond measure of your love and that it is strong enough and high enough to accept the spiritual love and union I offer...." Although it is likely that they consummated their love during a very brief period, Gonne was always certain that she could never marry "dearest Willie." She had two children during a love affair in France with Lucien Millevoye, and another son during a brief and stormy marriage to an Irish patriot, John MacBride, but she disliked sex and believed that its only purpose was for the creation of children. She knew that she was too strong-willed and independent and too committed to her many political and social causes to be a good wife. She was also intuitive enough to know that Yeats made beautiful poems out of his unhappiness and frustrated desire.

Maud Gonne was born in Aldershot, England, in 1866; her adored father, an English Army officer, brought the family to live in Ireland when his regiment was posted there. He switched his allegiance to the cause of Home Rule for Ireland and imbued Maud with his love of the country and the Irish people. After his untimely death when Maud was nineteen, she devoted the rest of her life to that cause. She acted on two lessons she had learned from her father: "Never be afraid," and "will is a force that can achieve anything."

Yeats and Gonne met in London in 1889. "The troubling of my life began," Yeats wrote after their meeting. He was twenty-three, poor, ambitious, and soon passionately in love with Gonne. Although she did not return his passion, they shared many interests, not only the cause of Irish nationalism. Yeats was fascinated by the occult and mysticism, and he and Gonne shared an attachment to place, a feeling of spirituality emanating from the land. A deep and abiding friendship developed between them, damaged by opposing political views but lasting a lifetime. Since they seldom lived in the same city, their correspondence was their lifeline. "She is my innocence, and I her wisdom," Yeats wrote.

Gonne was dependent on Yeats for help, advice, and support for her many causes, and he generously gave it, whether it was advice about her daughter Iseult's unhappy marriage, helping arrange her freedom from Hollaway Prison where she was detained with Countess Markiewicz during the Troubles, or unstinting and uncritical sympathy during the days of her divorce.

Her early letters to him are often urgent, filled with details of her current cause, humorless, and frantically rushed. "I am more busy than I can tell you. Domestic worries, Irish delegation, Transvaal volunteer returns, etc., etc. Will you please get...documents all together in an envelope and have them ready...hoping to hear from you soon" (1900). Seldom is any personal emotion expressed. "I don't like to talk about myself," she told him once. "Don't try to make me." She had a deep unwillingness to face her inner life, and preferred pouring her energies and imagination into her good causes rather than in establishing intimate personal relationships.

In 1903, Yeats wrote a long and impassioned letter to Gonne trying to dissuade her from marrying John MacBride. If she had listened to his sound advice, she would have saved herself from a marriage made violent and ugly by alcoholism which ended in divorce and greatly damaged Gonne's reputation. The only good thing to come of the marriage was her beloved son, Sean, who later became an Irish patriot, statesman, and tireless worker for social justice. Sean MacBride won the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1974, fifty-one years after Yeats received it for literature.

Despite the stress, tensions, and frustrations of their relationship, Gonne also had Yeats's best interests at heart, encouraging him, giving him valuable criticism when she felt he needed it, and expressing gratitude for the role she played in his life: "I like the poems so much...the slight alterations are improvements I think...there is a danger of my growing very vain when I think of these beautiful things created for me-thank you."

Because of Yeats's towering reputation and genius, Maud Gonne's reputation has been marginalized in history. Because she was a woman, she never attained official positions for the many functions she performed leading up to and during the war of Irish independence. Her services to the cause of social justice are often given the status of "do-gooding," rather than serious accomplishments. She is also thought of as a cold and unfeeling woman who led poor William Butler Yeats by the nose, using him when she needed him, discarding him when she didn't. Both these perceptions are wrong. Although always frustrated by Gonne's refusals of marriage, Yeats's work steadily gained in stature throughout the English-speaking world; his poetry, his theater accomplishments, and later his role as a senator in the new Irish Free State, brought him accolades and the pleasures of fame and success. He was not always pining after Gonne, but had several love affairs before he finally met and married Georgie Hyde Lees, with whom he had a long, loving, and stable marriage and two children: "My wife is a perfect wife, kind, wise, and unselfish ...she has made my life serene and full of order."

After his marriage, and during the years of the establishment of the Irish Free State, Yeats and Gonne drifted apart. She had become a Catholic upon her marriage to MacBride, and she often accused Yeats of being strongly anti-Catholic. They were on opposite sides politically, he becoming more and more conservative and finding her extreme Republicanism and support of violence in the cause of freedom annoying and finally boring. Her convictions didn't, after all, coincide with his own opinions, and he always had difficulty in adjusting to the idea of a woman holding opinions of her own. She never forgave him for serving in the senate of the new Irish Free State and voting for legislation that allowed her son Sean to be imprisoned without trial.

In 1938, five months before his death, Yeats wrote to Gonne: "I want you...to come here to tea at 4:30...a motor will call for you at 4....I have wanted to see you for a long time but...." She went, and it was the last time she saw him. He was writing poetry up until the time he died.

Several years after his death, Gonne wrote to a friend: "Politics had separated us for quite a long while...neither wanted to see the other, but at the last we had come together."

"The world will thank me for not marrying you," Gonne once told Yeats after one of his many proposals. "Our children were your poems of which I was the father sowing the unrest and storm which made them possible and you the mother who brought them forth in suffering and in the highest beauty, and our children had wings...."