Maud Gonne (1866-1953)

W. B. Yeats (poetical tributes, 1): ‘I would that we were changed to white birds on the wandering foam: I and you!’ (“The White Birds”). See also poems addressed to Maud Gonne: “When You are Old”; “He Bids his Beloved be at Peace”; “He gives his Beloved certain Rhymes”; “He Mourns for the Change that has come upon him and his Beloved, and longs for the End of the World”; “He remembers Forgotten Beauty”; “He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven”; “Lover Asks Forgiveness because of his Many Moods” [‘... cover the pale blossoms of your breast / With your dim heavy hair’]; “The Lover Mourns for the Loss of Love”; “The Lover Pleads ...”; “The Lover Speaks ...”; “The Poet Pleads with the Elemental Powers”, &c. Later references incl.: “Her Praise” [‘She is the foremost of those I would hear praised’]; “Beautiful Lofty Things” [‘Maud Gonne at Howth station waiting a train, / Pallas Athene in that straight back and arrogant head’]; ‘My dear is angry, that of late / I cry all base blood down / As if she had not taught me hate / By kisses by a clown’ (on her marriage to John MacBride).

W. B. Yeats (poetical tributes, 2): “A Bronze Head” [‘Here at right of the entrance this bronze head, / Human, superhuman, a bird’s round eye, / Everything else withered and mummy-dead. / What great tomb-haunter sweeps the distant sky /.../ And finds there nothing to make its terror less / Hysterica passio of its own emptiness?’; ‘But even in the starting-post, all sleek and new, / I saw the wildness in her and I thought / A vision of that terror it must live through’; “Circus Animals’ Desertion” [‘She [the Countess Cathleen], pity-crazed, had given her soul away, / But masterful Heaven had intervened to save it. / I thought my dear must her own soul destroy, / So did fanaticism and hate enslave it’]; “Reconciliation” [‘Some may have blamed you that you took away ...’]; “Quarrel in Old Age” [‘... All I had rhymed of that monstrous thing / Returned and yet unrequited love’ (“Presences”); ‘Where had her sweetness gone? ... Somewhere beyond the curtain / Of distorting days / Lives that lonely thing / That shone before these eyes / Targeted, trod like Spring.’]; “A Thought from Propertius” [‘she might, so noble from head / To great shapely knees / The long flowing line, / Have walked to the altar / Through the holy images / At Pallas Athene’s side ...’]; “The Old Age of Queen Maeve”, 1903 [‘O unquiet heart, / Why do you praise another, praising her, / As if there were no tale but your own tale / Worth knitting to a measure of sweet sound? / Have I not bid you tell of that great queen / Who has been buried some two thousand years? ... Friend of these many years, you too had stood / With equal courage in that whirling rout; / For you, although you’ve not her wandering heart, / Have all that greatness, and not hers alone, / For there is no high story about queens / In any ancient book but tells of you... [&c.]’]; “The Results of Thought” [‘Acquaintance; companion; / One dear brilliant woman; / The best-endowed, the elect, / All by their youth undone, / All, all, by that inhuman / Bitter glory wrecked ...’]

W. B. Yeats (poetical tributes, 3): “No Second Troy” [‘Why should I blame her ... teach ... most violent ways ... beauty like a tightened bow / That is not natural in an age like this’, .. &c.]; “O Do Not Love Too Long” [‘she changed ...’]; “Among School Children” [‘It seemed that our two natures blent / Into a sphere from youthful sympathy’], “Why Should Not Old Men Be Mad?” [‘A Helen of social welfare dream, / Climb on a wagonette to scream’]; “After Long Silence” [‘... Bodily decrepitude is wisdom; young / We loved each other and were ignorant’]; “The People” [‘I knew a phoenix in my youth, so let them have their day’; also ‘my phoenix’]; “First Love”, in “A man young and Old” [‘... I thought her body bore / A heart of flesh and blood. // But since I laid a hand thereon / And found a heart of stone ...’]. See also Yeats’ s lines on Iseult: ‘I am worn out with dreams; ... O would that we had met / When I had my burning youth! / But I grow old among dreams, / A weather-worn, marble triton / Among the streams.’ (“Men Improve With the Years”, 1917). Note that A. N. Jeffares (New Commentary., 1984) identifies the ‘reeling brain’ in “Man and Echo” with Margaret Ruddock and not with Maud Gonne [‘Did words of mine put too great a strain / On that woman’s reeling brain?’].

W. B. Yeats (Letter of 1 Feb. to John O’Leary on meeting Maud Gonne): ‘[...] she is not only very handsome but very clever. Though her politics in European matters be a little sensational - she was fully persuaded that Bismarck had poisoned or got murdered the Austrian King or prince or what was it? who died the other day. It was pleasant however to hear her attacking a young military man from India who was here [at dinner with her sister and cousin], on English rule in India. She is very Irish, a kind of Diana of the Crossways’. Her pet monkey was making, much of the time, little melancholy cries at the hearthrug ... There were also two young pidgeons in a cage, whom I mistook for sparrows. It was you, was it not, who converted Miss Gonne to her Irish opinions. She herself will make many converts.’ (Unpub. letter, Belfast Central Library; cited in Richard Ellmann, Yeats: The Man and the Masks (London: Faber [1948; rev. 1960], 1969, p.104).

W. B. Yeats [writing to Maud Gonne on her announcement of marriage to MacBride]: ‘I appeal to you in the name of 14 years friendship to read this letter. It is perhaps the last think I shall ever write to you. You possess your influence in Ireland very largely because you come to the people from above. You represent a superior class, a class where people are more independent, have a more beautiful life, a more refined life. Is it the priest, when the day of the great hazard has come who will lead the people. No, no. he will palter with the government as he did at the Act of Union, as he did when he denounced the Fenians. He will say, “be quiet, good Christian, do not shed blood.” I appeal to you, to come back to your self. To take up again the proud [s]alutary life which made you seem like one of the golden gods.’ (Anna MacBride-White, ed., Gonne-Yeats Letters, pp.384-85.)

W. B. Yeats, Memoirs (ed. Denis Donoghue, Macmillan 1972): ‘I was twenty-three years old when the troubling of my life began. I had heard from time to time in letters from Miss O’Leary, John O’Leary’s old sister, of a beautiful girl who had left the society of the Viceregal Court for Dublin nationalism. In after years I persuaded myself that I felt premonitory excitement at the first reading of her hame. Presently drove up to our house in Bedford Park with an introduction from John O’Leary to my father. I had never thought to see in a living woman so great beauty. It belonged to famous pictures, to poetry, to some legendary past. A complexion like the blossom of apples, and yet the face and body had the beauty of lineaments which Blake calls the highest beauty because it changes least from youth to age, and a stature so great she seemed of a divine race. Her movements were worthy of her form and I understood at last why the poet of antiquity, where we would speak of face and form, sings, loving some lady, that she paces like a goddess. I remember nothing of her speech that day except that she vexed my father by praise of war, for she too was of the Romantic movement, and found those uncontrovertible Victorian reasons, that seemd to announce so prosperous a future, a little grey. As I look backward, it seems to me that she brought into my life in those days - for as yet I saw only what lay upon the surface - the middle of the tint, a sound as of a Burmese gong, an overpowering tumult that had yet many pleasant secondary notes. / She asked [me] to dine with her that evenign in her rooms in Ebury Street, and I think that I dined with her all but every day during her stay in London of perhaps nine days [...; &c.]’ (Memoirs, ed. Denis Donoghue, 1972, p.40; quoted [in part] in Terence Brown, W. B. Yeats: A Life, 1999 [2001 Edn.], pp.47-48.] Yeats speaks of telling her he wished to become an Irish Victor Hugo, and suspecting his own sincerity - since he had seen works of Hugo on her table and ‘besides it was natural to commend myself by claiming a very public talent, for her beauty as I saw it in those days seemed incompatible with private, intimate life.’ (p.41.)

W. B. Yeats (“Autobiography”, in Memoirs, ed. Denis Donoghue, 1972): ‘She returned to Ierland in the same ship with Parnell’s body [...] I met her on the pier [at Kingstown] and went with her to her hotel, where we breakfasted. She was dressed in extravagantly deep mourning, for Parnell, people thought, thinking her very theatrical. We spoke of the child’s death. [...; 47] She was plainly very ill. (p.48.) ‘She had come [to] have need of me, as it seemed, and I had no doubt that need would become love, that it was already coming so. I had even as I watched her a sense of cruelty, as though I were a hunter taking captive some beautiful wild creature. We went to London and were initiated in the Hermetic Students, and I began to form plans of our lives devoted to mystic truth [..].’ (Ibid., pp.48-49.) ‘She seemed to understand every subtlety of my own art and especially all my spiritual philosophy ... I told her that during life we are able to enter at certain moments the heavenly circles we would inhabit in eternity’ (ibid., p.61.) ‘I now believe that Maud egonne had a strong subconscious conviction that ehr soul was lost, and that these symbols [i.e., of the ‘fires of Hell’] could become visible in minds in close accord with her mind. ’ (Ibid., p.62.) ‘My outer nature was passive - but for her I should never perhaps have left my desk - but I knew my spiritual nature was passionate, even violent. In her all this was reversed, for it was her spirit only that was gentle and passive ...’ (Ibid., p.124.) ‘She thought herself a great stone statue through which passed flame, and I felt myself becoming flame and mounting through and looking out of the eyes of a great stone Minerva. Were the beings which stand behind human life trying to unite us, or had we brought it by our own dreams?’ (Ibid., p.134; also quoted in Daniel Albright, Intro., W. B. Yeats The Poems, Everyman 1992, p.xxxii.)

W. B. Yeats (“Journal”): ‘Today the thought came to me that [Maud] never really understands my plans, or nature, or ideas. Then came the thought, what matter? How much of the best I have done and still do is but the attempt to explain myself to her? If she understood, I should lack a reason for writing and one never can have too many reasons for doing what is so laborious.’ ([22 Jan. 1909]; ibid., p.141.)

W. B. Yeats (“Autobiography”, in Memoirs, ed. Denis Donoghue, Macmillan 1972): ‘It was a time of great personal strain and sorrow. Since my mistress had left me, no other women had come into my life, and for nearly seven years none did. Often [...] it would have been a relief to have screamed aloud. When desire became an unendurable torture, I would masturbate, and that no matter how moderate I was, would make me ill. It never occurred to me me to seek another love. I would repeat to myself again and again the last confession of Lancelot, and indeed it was my greatest pride, “I have loved a queen beyond measure and exceeding long.” I was never before or since so miserable as in those years.’ (Memoirs, ed., Denis Donoghue, 1972, p.125; quoted in Terence Brown, A Life of W. B. Yeats, 1999 [2001 pb edn.], p.95.) Also quotes: ‘All our lives long, da Vinci says, we long, thinking it is but the moon we long [for], for our destruction, and how, when we meet [it] in the shape of a most fair woman, can we do less than leave all others for her? Do we not seek our own dissolution on her lips?’ (Memoirs, p.88; quoted in Brown, op. cit., p.94.)

W. B. Yeats, Autobiographies (1955): ‘I was twenty-three years old when the troubling of my life began (cf. Autobiographi es, 1955, p.123). Further, ‘Presently a hansom drove up to our door at Bedford Park with Miss Maud Gonne, who brought an introduction to my father from old John O’Leary, the Fenian leader. She vexed my father by praise of war, war for its own sake, not as the creator of certain virtues but as if there were some virtue in excitement itself. I supported her against my father, which vexed him the more ... a man young as I could not have differed from a woman so beautiful and young. [...] In that day she seemed a classical impersonation of the Spring, the Virgilian commendation “She walks like a goddess” made for her alone. Her complexion was luminous, like that of apple-blossom through which the light falls, and I remember her standing that first day by a great heap of such blossoms in the window. In the next few years I saw her always when she passed to and fro between Dublin and Paris, surrounded, no matter how rapid her journey and how brief her stay at either end of it, by cages full of birds, canaries, finches of all kinds, dogs, a parrot, and once a full-grown hawk from Donegal.... It was years before I could see into the mind that lay hidden under so much beauty and so much energy.’ (q.p.) Further, ‘She looked as though she lived in an ancient civilisation where all superiorities whether of the body or the mind were part of a public ceremonial ... Her beauty, backed by her great stature, could instantly effect an assembly and hot, as often with our stage beauties, because obvious and florid, for it was incredibly distinguished, and if - as must be that it might seem that assembly’s very self, fused, unified, and solitary - her face, like the face of some Greek statue, showed little thought, her whole body seemed a master work of long labouring thought ... My devotion might as well have been offered to an image in a milliner’s window, or to a statue in a museum, but romantic doctrine had reached its extreme development (From ‘Dramatis Personae’, in Autobiographies, p.364 [var. 264]; quoted in part in Terence Brown, A Life of W. B. Yeats, 1999 [20001 pb. edn.], p.101-02.) ‘Her power over crowds was at its height, and some portion of the power came because she could still, even when pushing an abstract principle to what seemed to me a absurdity, keep her mind free, and so when men and women did her bidding they did it not only because she was beautiful, but because that beauty suggested joy and freedom. Besides, there was an element in her beauty that moved minds full of old Gaelic stories and poems, for she looked as if she lived in an ancient civilisation where all superiorities whether of the mind or the body were a part of public ceremonial, were in some way the crowd’s creation. Her beauty, backed by her great stature, could instantly affect an assembly, and not, as often with our stage beauties, because obvious and florid, for it was incredibly distinguished, and if – as must be that it might seem that assembly’s very self, fused, unified, and solitary – her face, like the face of some Greek statue, showed little thought, her whole body seemed a master-work of long labouring thought.’ (Autobiographies, p.364.) ‘Maude Gonne has a look of exultation as she walks with her laughing thrown back’ (‘Stirring of the Bones’, in ibid., q.p.; and note Maud Gonne’s use of the same in Quotations, infra.]

[Egyptian priestess]: Yeats has a dream in which an apparition, part Maud Gonne and part Egyptian priestess, appears: ‘Perhaps when one loves one is not quite sane, or perhaps one can pierce – in sudden intuition – behind the veil. I decided to make this woman [Gonne’s grey apparition] visible at will. I had come to believe that she was an evil spirit troubling Maud Gonne’s life unseen, weakening affections and above all creating a desire for power and excitement. But if it were visible, it would speak, it would puts its temptations into words and she would face it with her intellect, and at last banish it.... It was a past personality of hers, now seeking to reunited with her. She had been a priestess in a temple somewhere in Egypt and under the influence of a certain priest who was her lover gave false oracles for money, and because of this the personality of that life had split off from the soul and remained a half-living shadow. (Autobiographies, p.274).

Maud Gonne as Cathleen Ni Houlihan - Yeats’s response (Ernest A. Boyd, The Contemporary Irish Drama, 1917)

Ernest A. Boyd, Contemporary Irish Drama (1917): ‘Yeats has placed on record a touching tribute to this interpretation of his thought: “Miss Maude Gonne played very finely, and her great height made Cathleen seem a divine being fallen into our mortal infirmity.” “It was a fine thing,” he wrote in Samhain after the performance, “ for so beautiful a woman to consent to play my poor old Cathleen, and she played with nobility and tragic power.” He contrasts her acting and that of her successors in the role with the unfortunate innovations of certain actresses on this side of the Atlantic. “The part has been twice played in America by women who insisted on keeping their young faces, and one of these, when she came to the door, dropped her cloak, as I have been told, and showed a white satin dress embroidered with shamrocks!” For the information of those interested he adds: “The most beautiful woman of her time, when she played my Cathleen, ‘made up’ centuries old, and never should the part be played but with a like sincerity.” (Boyd, op. cit., p.66.)

[Maud Gonne & the rioters]: ‘Maud has a look of exultation as she walks with her laughing head thrown back’, “The Stirring of the Bones”, in Autobiographies, 1955, [p.5]; quoted in Daniel Albright, Intro., W. B. Yeats The Poems, Everyman 1992, remarking that ‘[...] Yeats regarded himself as a man whose emotional life was half-crippled by his obsession with Maud Gonne (ibid., p.xxxi.)

W. B. Yeats (Unpublished MS): ‘For years to come I was in my thoughts as in much of my writings to seek alone to bring again imaginative life to the old sacred places [?in] Slieve Knocknarea all that old reverence that hung above all conspicuous hills ... I believed we were about to have a revelation. Maud Gonne entirely shared this idea and I did not doubt that in carrying this out I should win her for myself. Politics were merely a means of meeting her but this was a link so perfect that would restore at once even in a quarrel the sense of intimacy.’ (unpub. MS, cited in by Jeffares, New Commentary, 1984, p.23.)

W. B. Yeats (Sundry occasions): ‘As a young man I could not have differed from a woman so beautiful and so young’ (cited in Elizabeth Butler Cullingford, Gender and History in Yeats’s Love Poetry, Cambridge UP 1993, p.36). Yeats wrote in summer 1897: ‘I was tortured by sexual desire and disappointed love. Often as I walked in the woods at Coole it would have been a relief to have screamed aloud.’ (Quoted in R. F. Foster, Apprentice Mage, 1996, p.20; cited in Elsie Gaw, UUC MA, 1999.) Further, To Yeats, Maud Gonne made the character of Cathleen in first performance of Cathleen ni Houlihan seem ‘a divine being fallen into our mortal infirmity’ (Notes to Cathleen ni Houlihan, in Plays in Prose and Verse, London: Macmillan 1922, p.vii. Yeats wrote that Maud Gonne performed the part ‘very finely, and her great height made Cathleen seem a divine being fallen into our mortality’. (Cathleen ni Houlihan, Appendix II; cited in A. N. Jeffares, A New Commentary on the Poems of W. B. Yeats, 1984, p.80.)

W. B. Yeats (sleep-talking?): ‘Sometimes, when I had gone to sleep with the endeavour to send my soul to that of Maud Gonne, using some symbol, which I forget, I would wake dreaming of a shower of precious stones. Sometimes she would have some corresponding experience in Paris and upon the same night. […] I thought we become one in a world of emotion eternalised by its own intensity and purity, and that this world had for its symbol precious stones. No physical, sexual sensation ever accompanied those dreams.’ (Memoirs, p.128.)

W. B. Yeats: ‘The papers of Russia, France and even Egypt quote her speeches, and the tale of Irish wrongs has found its way hither and thither to lie stored up, perhaps, inmany a memory against the day of need.’ (Boston Pilot, rep. in Horace Reynolds, ed., Letters to the New Island, OU 1934, pp.149-50; quoted in John McGovern, MA Diss. UUC 2002.)

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George Russell, concluding a letter to W. B. Yeats (May 1903): ‘[...] The company have come back with the majesty which does befit kings after their visit to London. [...] I am delighted they did so well from all accounts. I am sure it was an immense relief to you. Had you frightened the London critics or was it genuine appreciation, or was it due to the union of hearts which by the way Mrs. MacBride rudely shocked last night in the most gorgeous row Dublin has had since jubilee time. The Rotunda meeting was a free fight and two M.Ps are incapacitated. The Freeman tries to depreciate the effect of the row, but the Irish Times and Express and Independent give good reports and do justice to the scrimmage. [...]’ (In Alan Denson, Letters from AE, London: Abelard-Schuman 1961, p.47.) See also his letter to Sarah Purser of 5 March 1902: ‘[..] Ireland stands where it did since you left, but I expect it will get a good lift when miss Gonne appears as “Kathleen Ni Houlihan” in Willie Yeats’ little one act play which will be produced with Deirdre in Easter week. [...] the daughters of Erin have thrown their aegis over us, and Yeats and I are being [38] produced under the auspices.’ (Denson, ed., op. cit., pp.38-39.)

Stephen Gwynn, ‘The Irish Drama’, in Justin McCarthy, ed. Irish Literature (1904), vol. X, ed. Charles Welsh, ‘Miss Maud Gonne, as every one knows, is a woman of superb stature and beauty; she is said to be an orator, and she certainly has the gifts of voice and gesture. To the courage and sincerity of her acting I can pay no better tribute than to say that her entrance brought instantly to my mind a half-mad old-wife in Donegal whom I have always known. She spoke in that sort of keening cadence so frequent with the beggars and others in Ireland who lament their state. But for all that, tall and gaunt as she looked under her cloak, she did not look and she was not meant to look like a beggar [...; pp.xix-xxii]. Note also Gwynn’s comments on the effect of the play: ‘The effect of Cathleen ni Houlihan on me was that I went home asking myself if such plays should be produced unless one was prepared for people to go out to shoot and be shot. [...] above all Miss Gonne’s impersonation had stirred the audience as I have never seen another audience stirred’. (Irish Literature and Drama, 1936, p.158.)

M. Barry Delaney [her co-edit. on L’Irlande Libre] wrote a poem in form of hymn to Maud Gonne: ‘Uncrowned, save by a nation’s love, our island’s maiden queen, / By spell of her young voice alone, unfurls the standard green, / Where in the days of gallant Hoche, the sword of Tone fell keen! ... Along our Maid of Erin pleads, as once the Orleans Maid / Before whose mystic banner fled the Saxon host afraid / As now when, by a maiden’s words, are Erin’s foes dismayed! / Oh, fairest flower of womanhood, her weakness is her strength: / Proud hearts unto passionate pleas a will ear have lent, / And knee[l]s to her, the Uncrowned, bowed, that ne’er before had bent! / Not nobler the soldier who his sword in combat draws / Or patriot who frames at home his country’s code of laws / Than she who pleads in stranger tongue her island’s sacred cause.’ (The Shan Van Vocht, 7 Feb. 1898, p.33). Note, Barry Delaney was afterwards Iseult Gonne’s governess and a witness in the divorce trial of 1905-06.’

Frank J. Fay: Reviewing the first production of Diarmuid and Grania (along with Casadh an tSugain, in which the Inghinidhe na h-Eireann played), Fay wrote, ‘Monday evening was a memorable one for Dublin and for Ireland. The Irish language has been heard on the stage of the principal metropolitan theatre, and “A Nation Once Again” has been sung within its walls, and hope is strong within us once more. The Gaiety Theatre was crowded in all parts, and Ireland’s greatest daughter, Miss Maud Gonne, sat beside Ireland’s greatest poet, Mr W. B. Yeats.’ (&c.; cited in James W. Flannery, Yeats and the Idea of a Theatre, 1976, p.166; see also under Fay).

W. G. Fay: ‘Never again will there be such a splendid Cathleen as she. In her, the youth of the country say all that was magnificent in Ireland. She was the very personification of the figure she portrayed on stage.’ (In Stephen Gwynn, ed., Scattering Branches, facs. edn. Edinburgh: Clarke 1990, pp.125-26; quoted in John McGovern, MA Diss. UUC 2002.)

James Cousins writes that Maud Gonne brought to Cathleen Ni Houlihan ‘a curious sense of “presence”, of something to live up to, she became not only an actress but an incarnate responsibility.’ (We Two Together, Madras Ganeth [sic] & Co. 1950, p.71; cited in James Flannery, W. B. Yeats and the Idea of the Theatre, 1976.)

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Mary Colum, Life and the Dream (London: Macmillan 1947): ‘Ten, fifteen minutes passed and the curtain did not go up. Somebody or something was being waited for. At last we saw Yeats enter hastily ... accompanied by a tall woman dressed in black, one of the tallest women I have ever seen. Instantly a small group in the pit began to hiss loudly and to shout “Up MacBride” ... the woman stood and faced her hissers, her whole figure showing a lively emotion ... Yeats standing beside her, looked bewildered as the hissing went on: his face was set in lines of gloom, but she was smiling and unperturbed. Soon a counter hissing set up, the first hissers being drowned by another group and then I realised who she was ... She was a legend to us young persons in our teens .... Her height would have drawn attention anywhere, but it was her beauty that produced the most startling effect. It was startling in its greatness, its dignity, its strangeness. Supreme beauty is so rare that its first effect is a kin0d of shock’. (p.142; quoted in Anthony J. Jordan, The Yeats Gonne MacBride Triangle, Westport 2000, p.102.)

Louis MacNeice, The Poetry of W. B. Yeats, 1944: Maud Gonne wrote in her autobiography [Servant of the Queen], after explaining why in 1897 she joined the RC Church, ‘I believe every political movement on earth has is counterpart in the spirit world and the battles we fight here have perhaps been already fought out on another plane and great leaders draw their often unexplained power from this. She though that Parnell had ‘failed because he repudiated acts of violence’ and plotted with the Belgians to blow up British troop ships in the Boer War. (but cf. AN Jeffares, Commentary, 1984, ‘offered a Boer agent in Brussels a plan to put bombs in British troopships bound for Africa, citing Hone, WBY, p.169, and Jeffares, Yeats, Man and Poet, p.133);

Louis MacNeice on Maud Gonne’s English parentage and her Irish fanaticism, in Autumn Journal: So reading the memoirs of Maud Gonne, / Daughter of an Englsh mother and a soldier father, .I note how a single purpose can be founded on  / A jumble of opposites: / Dublin Castle, the vice-regal ball, / The embassies of Europe, / Hatred on a wall, / Gaols and revolvers […]’ (Canto XVI, Coll. Poems, 131, p.131.)

Kate O’Brien: ‘We used to track Maud Gonne about, too, when she was out of jail. She was marvellous and tall, with her accompanying Irish wolfhounds.’ (Quoted in John Cronin, The Irish Novel 1900-1940, 1991, Appletree Press, p.138.)

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Richard Ellmann, Yeats: The Man and the Masks (1948; rev. ed. 1962), has introductory remarks quoting Maud Gonne’s autobiography, where she speaks of Yeats’ s autobiography and the fact that it gave little indication of the intensity and enthusiasm which raged in his youth since the self-possessed old man had buried the extravagant boy. Note that Ellmann characterises her as the prototype for Michael Gillane, who is made to leave his bride for the rebellion by the urgings of Cathleen, played by Maud. (p.135).

Richard Ellmann, Yeats: The Man and the Masks (1948; rev. edn. 1962) - cont.: cites a letter Yeats wrote to O’Leary with his account of the arrival of Maud Gonne at Bedford Sq. (written 1 Feb.): ‘ ... she is not only very handsome but very clever. Though her politics in European matters be a little sensational - she was fully persuaded that Bismarck had poisoned or got murdered the Austrian King or prince or what was it? who died the other day. It was pleasant howver to hear her attacking a yong military man from India who was here [at dinner with her sister and cousin], on English rule in India. she is very Irish, a kind of Diana of the Crossways’. Her pet monkey was making, much of the time, little melancholy cries at the hearthrug ... There were also two young pidgeons in a cage, whom I mistook for sparrows. It was you, was it not, who converted Miss Gonne to her Irish opinions. She herself will make many converts.’ (Unpub. Letter, Belfast Central Library; cited in Richard Ellmann, Yeats: The Man and the Masks (London: Faber [1948; rev. 1960], 1969, p.104); and note that Diana of the Crossways is a Meredith novel, supposedly based on Caroline Norton.

Dominic Daly, The Young Douglas Hyde (1974), Hyde meet Maud Gonne at Sigerson’s, 16 Dec., wrote, ‘go teac Shigerson san trathnóna, náit a connairc me an bhean budh éblouissante d’á bhfacas ariamh, i. Miss Gonne, a cruinnigh a méad a bhífiorann san rúma ann a timchioll, B’ionghantach ard & breagh í. ... Bhí suran ann mo cheann le na breághact!! [my head is spinning with the beauty of her]. In the ensuing months he meets her again, receives her portrait, and teaches her Irish. [95-97] Daly comments, The Irish lessons evidently petered out. [97]. In a note he quotes from Servant of the Queen, ‘Douglas Hyde, a student in Trinity, believed in the language to free Ireland; to me the method seemed too slow, under his tuition I learned a sentence or two with which to begin my speeches ... Douglas Hyde never suceeded making me an Irish speaker any more than I succeeded in making him a revolutionist.’ (pp.93-94).

See also her remarks on Hyde’s Literary History of Ireland (1899; [new ed. 1967]), of which Maud Gonne wrote, ‘an inspiration to O’Leary’s group of young poets, writers and revolutionists; it supplied the intellectual background of revolt.’ (Servant of the Queen, p.94; Daly, op. cit. p.136.)

C. L. Innes, ‘“A Voice in Directing the Affairs of Ireland”, L’Irlande libre, The Shan Van Vocht, and Bean na h-Eireann’, in Paul Hyland and Neil Sammells, eds., Irish Writing, Subversion and Exile (Macmillan 1991), pp.146-58, quotes of a poem in form of a hymn to Maud Gonne by M Barry Delaney [her co-edit. on L’Irlande Libre]: ‘Uncrowned, save by a nation’s love, our island’s maiden queen, / By spell of her young voice alone, unfurls the standard green, / Where in the days of gallant Hoche, the sword of Tone fell keen! ... Along our Maid of Erin pleads, as once the Orleans Maid / Before whose mystic banner fled the Saxon host afraid / As now when, by a maiden’s words, are Erin’s foes dismayed! / Oh, fairest flower of womanhood, her weakness is her strength: / Proud hearts unto passionate pleas a will ear have lent, / And knee[l]s to her, the Uncrowned, bowed, that ne’er before had bent! / Not nobler the soldier who his sword in combat draws / Or patriot who frames at home his country’s code of laws / Than she who pleads in stranger tongue her island’s sacred cause. (The Shan Van Vocht, 7 Feb. 1898, p.33).

Peter Costello, The Heart Grown Brutal [ … &c.] (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan 1977), gives an account of the first performance of Cathleen ni Houlihan (April 1902), and Maud Gonne’s role in it, ‘On wonders if Maud Gonne’s imagination, inflamed at the best of times, ever recovered from that impersonation; whether in later life she was not continuing the same dramatic performance on other more public stages.’ (p.27.)

David Cairns & Shaun Richards, Writing Ireland: Nationalism and Culture (Manchester 1988), Colum’s basic theme of British authority and asserting Irish rights to land and property, even at the pain of individual loss [in The Saxon Shillin’] anticipates Maud Gonne’s own play Dawn, which was published in The United Irishman in [29 Oct.]1904. Gonne, like Colum, but with more consciously poetic language, stresses the callous brutality of The Stranger, but goes further in ending not on the glorious sacrifice for Ireland, but on the dedication of the men to revolutionary action. The play’s conclusion merits attention for its emphasis on the re-dedication of life to a Mother Ireland [which] likens it to Yeats’s Cathleen Ni Houlihan; as Seamus, who had also taken the Saxon shilling declares, ‘Mother, forgive me for Brideen’s sake. Let me, too, die for you’; an act of individual and communal assertion through which ‘Bride of the Sorrows’ will be transformed into ‘Bride of the Victories’ [see Hogan and Kilroy, 1970, Lost Plays of the Irish Renaissance, p.84]. The notable feature is not so much the willing embrace of death for the nationalist cause but the fact that death is chosen so as to transform Kathleen and Bride (the Mother in Dawn) namely Ireland herself, into a state of youth, beauty, and freedom ... [&c.]

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A. N. Jeffares, W. B. Yeats, A New Biography (London: Hutchinson 1988) gives an extended account of Maud Gonne in relation to Yeats; establishes that the child she told Yeats she had adopted, which had died, was her son Georges by Lucien Millevoye (b. 11 Jan. 1890; d. of meningitis, 29 July 1891); when Yeats arrived at Kingstown to meet her, she was on board the mailboat carrying Parnell’s body back to Ireland (p.59); Iseult, conceived for the sake of reincarnating the soul of the dead George, later called Georgette, in the vault in Paris where he was buried in August 1891; Iseult was born on 6 Aug. 1894. Maud Gonne, addressing meeting in Dame St. called by James Connolly, told of visiting Sheares Bros. graves in St Michan’s and her refusal of entry, saying: ‘Must the graves of our dead go undecorated because of the Queen’s Jubilee?’; crowd went wild (p.105).

A. N. Jeffares, W. B. Yeats (1988) - cont.: addressing meeting in Dame St. called by James Connolly, told of visiting Sheares Bros. graves in St Michan’s, and refusal of entry, ‘Must the graves of our dead go undecorated because of the Queen’s Jubilee?’; crowd went wild (p.105). Jeffares recounts and quotes Maud Gonne’s account of visit to Lia Fail in Westminster with Yeats, in which he asks her to marry him, purporting to be made happy, to which she replies, ‘Oh yes, you are, because you make beautiful poetry out of what you call your unhappiness and you are happy in that. Marriage would be such a dull affair. Poets should never marry. The world should thank you for not marrying you.’(A Servant of the Queen, 1939, p.328; Jeffares, 1988, p.128.).

A. N. Jeffares, W. B. Yeats (1988) - cont.:Plotting and arranging contacts between French Military Intelligence and the IRB – something which backfired when a French agent who had met Dr Ryan in London was passed on to O’Donnell and subsequently arrested. She suggested to a Boer agent in Brussels a plan to plant bombs in the coal of British troopships en route to South Africa; the idea seemed too risky, but she did get £2,000 to aid revolutionary work in Ireland. O’Donnell suspected of diverting [IRB] money to Irish Parliamentary Party; it was returned after Yeats spoke to John Dillon; IRB thought O’Donnell should be murdered and though his crazy enmity had pursued both of them,Yeats and Maud Gonne persuaded the IRB men out of the plan. They got themselves out of the IRB both somewhat shaken by the affair. She turned to the formation of the Young Ireland Societies (p.130); interrupted Rotunda meeting to arouse hostility to Edward VII visit, 1903; vetoed Lady Gregory play, Twenty-Five, as encouraging emigration [136]

A. N. Jeffares, W. B. Yeats (1988) - cont.: Visiting her in 1917, Yeats wrote to Lady Gregory saying that she was in ‘a joyous and self-forgetting condition of political hate’ such as he had never encountered [220].

Note: Her reminiscences appeared in 1938; she found and a second volume too painful to continue; to some extent, Yeats’s concern with the aging process stems from the fact that, though heart-stoppingly beautiful, she aged badly. SEE ALSO A N Jeffares, ‘Pallas Athene Gonne’, in Tributes ... to Shotaro Oshima (Tokyo 1970), pp.4-7.

James Fairhall (James Joyce and the Question of History, 1993), ‘Inghinidhe na hEireann, inaugurated in Oct. 1900 under the presidency of Maud Gonne, took action by producing leaflets that warned girls agains “consorting with the enemies of their country”.’ Margaret Ward (Unmanageable Revolutionaries: Women and Irish Nationalism (London: Pluto 1983) continues, ‘imaginative propagandists, [they] revealed little awareness of the reasons why women were forced to resort to prostitution. However, a decade later, Maud ... appealed through the pages of The Irish Worker for men and women to come together “without any false modesty” in order to see what could be done to prevent the system where “women were forced to sell their body, mind and soul.” She admitted that Inghinidhe ... had simply “appealed to girls as sisters to keep out of temptation’s way ... [with] no alternative to offer – they couldn’t get non-existent, or atrociously paid factory jobs for the women. [Ward, p.54; Fairhall, p.153]

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Frank Tuohy, Yeats (1976), When MG was 16, her father was posted as Adjut.-Gen. to Dublin [but see supra]. ALSO, To Katharine Tynan, Yeats wrote, ‘Who told you that I am taken up with Maud Gonne? I think she is very beautiful and that is all I think about her. What you say of her fondness for sensation is probably true.’ (p.58); on playing Cathleen, ‘Miss Gonne played very finely, and her great height made Cathleen seem a divine being falling in to our mortal infirmity’; according to Maire nic Shuibliagh, ‘Maud Gonne arrived late the first night and caused a minor sensation by sweeping through the auditorium in the ghostly robes of the Old Woman ... ten minutes before we were due to begin. Frank Fay pursed his lips and stamped away in annoyance from his peeephole in the proscenium. Unprofessional, he called it ...’ (p.103).

Frank Tuohy, Yeats (1976) - cont.: MG protested Victoria’s Jubilee [as above]; published in The United Irishman ‘the Famine Queen’ at arrival of Queen Victoria in Dublin, ‘taking the Shamrock in her withered hand and daring to ask Ireland for soldiers - for soldiers to protect the exterminators of their race’ (p.107)); used her conspicuous appearance by walking out in the first performance of Shadow in the Glen, later writing, ‘If the Irish people do not understand or care for an Irish play, I should feel very doubtful of its right to rank as national literature, though all the critics in England were loud in its praise and though I myself might see beauty in it.’ (p.124); proclaimed during South African War that ‘John MacBride has done more for Ireland by organising the Irish Brigade in the Transvaal than any living man. It saved Ireland’s honour at a time when there was great need’; warned by Arthur Griffith, ‘For your own sakes and for the sake of Ireland to whom you both belong, don’t get married’ (p.125); after her breakup with MacBride and the spite of Catholic Dublin, she forgave them; according to Sean O’Casey, she was ‘the Colonel’s daughter still’ (p.128) [cited also in Roy Foster, reviewing Levenson, Maud Gonne, in TLS, 30.10.1977]; ‘Maud Gonne’s impersonation [in Cathleen ni Houlihan] had stirred the audience as I have never seen another audience stirred’ (p.129); [convinced the Lady Gregory and Annie Horniman were in love with Yeats:] ‘Miss Horniman brought back the Italian plaques to decorate the Abbey, but Lady Gregory carried off Willie to the Italian towns where they were made.’ (p.134); [Yeats] found the ageing [?]Sibylline [in Normandy during the two summers he spent there [1916-17] with ‘her eagle look’ to be ‘in a joyous and self-forgetting condition of political hate the like of which I have not yet encountered.’ (p.166).

James W. Flannery, Yeats and the Idea of a Theatre (Tor: Macmillan 1976; rep. pb. Yale UP 1989); cites her ‘Castle of Heroes’, imagined with Yeats, which - according to T. R. Henn, sounds more like a hospital for wounded Irish soldiers than a mystical retreat [Henn, p.172; Flannery, p.64.]; see also Flannery’s remarks on Maud Gonne, pp.96-97, &c., in which he characterises her as Yeats’s image of living heroism.

Donald Torchiana, Backgrounds for Joyce’s Dubliners (1986), p.90n., extract from Dawn, ‘They have bright swords with them that clash the battle welcome, A welcome to the red Sun, that rises with our luck’; bibl., Lost Plays of the Irish Renaissance, ed. Robert Hogan and James Kilroy (Newark: Proscenium 1970). SEE also Chris Healy, Confessions of a Journalist, 2nd ed. (London: Chatto&Windus 1904), pp.227-31, for more on Maud Gonne as Irish St Joan and her hopes of the French. NOTE, according to Margaret Ward, her first child was a boy, George; according to Levenson (1977), a girl, Georgette, born in May 1889.

Peter Costello, The Heart Grown Brutal [... &c.] (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan 1977): and account of the first performance of Cathleen ni Houlihan (April 1902), and Maud Gonne’s role in it, ‘On wonders if Maud Gonne’s imagination, inflamed at the best of times, ever recovered from that impersonation; whether in later life she was not continuing the same dramatic performance on other more public stages.’ (p.27.)

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David Krause, ‘The Politics of Maud and the Poetics of Willie’, review of Anna MacBride-White and A. N. Jeffares, eds., The Gonne-Yeats Letters, 1893-1939 (NY: Norton 1993; Syracuse 1994), in Irish Literary Supplement (Fall 1995), pp.21-23; 373: incls; 30 from Yeats, of which 19 appear at the end. Krause quotes: ‘I never indulged I self-analysis and often used to get impatient with Willie Yeats, who, like other writers, was terribly introspective and tried to make me so. “I have no time to think of myself”, I told him which was literally true, for, unconsciously perhaps, I had redoubled work to avoid thought.’ (Servant of the Queen). Quotes further (on In the Shadow of the Glen): ‘I must say I agree with you as to [Synge’s] really remarkable force & talent as a dramatic writer, though still I think this play is not for the many in Ireland & not helpful to the movement as we were trying to carry it out at that time.’ (Letter, Jan. 1905); after the Playboy she writes: ‘I felt cross at the way you let the theatre in particular Synge’s play interfere with your work.’ (Letter of 1907).

Further on The Playboy [Maud Gonne to Yeats from Paris]: ‘I was at the 1st performance of [Maurice Bourgeois’s] translation of Synge’s playboy [sic] yesterday & hated and loathed it more than words can say. It wa received with puzzled coldness by the French audience, who went away thinking that the Ireland they had dreamed of was after all only a dirty place filled with drunken criminal people little better than savages.’ (Letter of 1913.)

David Krause, review of The Gonne-Yeats Letters, in Irish Literary Supplement (Fall 1995) - cont.: quotes from Yeats’s Journal: ‘Maud Gonne and I got into the old argument about Sinn Fein and its attack on Synge, and the general circumstances that surrounded the first split in the Theatre. I notice that the old quarrel is the one difference about which she feels strongly. I for this very reason let myself get drawn into it again and again, thinking to convince her at last that apart from wrongs and rights impossible to settle so long after, it was fundamental. I could not have done otherwise. My whole movement, my integrity as a man of letters, were alike involved. Thinking of her as I do, as in a sense Ireland, a summing up in one mind of what is best in the romantic Ireland of my youth and of the youth of others for some years yet, I must see to it that I close the Synge essay [“Synge and the Ireland of His Time”, 1911] with a statement of national literature as I would re-create it, and of its purpose. It is useless to attack if one does not create. / I must touch on these things. All literature created out of a conscious political aim in the long [run] creates weakness by creating a habit of unthinking obedience and a habit of distrust of spontaneous impulse. It makes a nation of slaves in the nameO of liberty.’ (May 1910.)

David Krause, review of The Gonne-Yeats Letters, in Irish Literary Supplement (Fall 1995) - cont.: n reading A Portrait of the Artist, Maud Gonne wrote to Yeats, ‘I read it with wearyness & difficulty, it seemed to be deadly dull – It sent me to sleep several evenings ... There is no character vividly drawn except the careless self satisfied drunken father ... There are little tidbits of coarseness dragged in unnecessarily, because so called realist writers who seem to me to miss the real essence of life, think they may get an effect by shocking their readers which will make them forget the monotonous dullness of the pages. To have lived in Dublin & seen nothing but its uglyness & squalor, to have associated with those eager intensely living people & to have been able to describe nothing but dull futility and boredom seems to denote a nature to whom the stars would look like bits of tinsel paper – Tell me the truth – confess – you have not read the book yourself? Ezra Pound has perhaps read you extracts – isn’t that so?’

David Krause, review of The Gonne-Yeats Letters, in Irish Literary Supplement (Fall 1995) - cont.: Maud Gonne wrote to Yeats on receiving a copy of his poem “Easter 1916”: ‘No, I don’t like your poem, it isn’t worthy of you & above all it isn’t worthy of the subject’; [in response to his lines, ‘Too long a sacrifice/Can make a stone of the heart’:] ‘it isn’t quite sincere enough for you who have studied philosophy & know something of history know quite well that sacrifice has never yet turned a heart to stone’.

Maud Gonne on Hugh Lane: ‘I think Lane is behaving very disgracefully about the picture collection. I don’t see that the Dublin Corporation can do more than they have done. Lane has got his knighthood by pretending to give the pictures, now he is taking them back, probably to some other advantage elsewhere – it is almost a swindle & I hope he will be made to feel it, by those whose society he desires – He seems to me to be violating every rule of honour, he is acting as after all one expects a jew picture dealer to do –he has lived & made money in that world, so I suppose he has adoped their habits of mind & conduct.’ (5 Sept. 1913.)

Maud Gonne on the the 1913 Lock Out Strike: ‘The employers who are trying to starve the transport union are cirminals & like most criminals are stupid as well ... They are getting ashamed of themselves & many of them are longing to get out of the false situation Murphy has placed them in ... I have sold my diamond necklace, it is the last jewel I have left to keep up & increase the number of dinners for the children.’

On Dreyfus: ‘I hold that Dreyfus was an uninteresting jew [sic] & to much money was spent in his cause for it to be an honest cause ... Being a nationalist, I sympathised with French nationalists who objected to the Jews and international finance interfering in their country & upsetting their institutions – I also held – and still hold, that on matters I am not prepared to study deeply – the safe rule is to look on which side England ranges herself and to go to the opposite.’ (Letter, 4 Oct. 1927).

David Krause, review of The Gonne-Yeats Letters, in Irish Literary Supplement (Fall 1995) - cont.: Krause quotes Yeats on her first impact on his father [John Butler Yeats]: ‘She vexed my father by praise of war, war for its own sake, not as the vreator of certain virtues but as if there were some virtue in excitement itself.’

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Margaret Ward reviews Maud Gonne-W .B. Yeats Letters, in Fortnight (Sept. 1992). In a letter written during the divorce saga, she writes, ‘I have always recognised the possibility that the forces or the Gods who used me as an instrument to work through in Ireland would suddenly find other instruments & my power over crowds would go [...] & yet I know I could still move the crowds if I could show them a fiercer & a wilder way to freedom’. Regarding her name, she wrote, ‘you are quite right to address my letters to Madame Maud Gonne. I have always been Madame Maud Gonne before & since my marriage so the divorce makes no difference in this respect.’ Only after her husband’s execution in 1916 did she become Maud Gonne MacBride. She was very bitter against Yeats’s acceptance of a Free State senatorship. Yeats sought to intervene on her behalf when she was imprisoned in 1923. He responded to her republican militancy with moderation, ‘we have argued again the old problem we have fought over since we were in our middle twenties.’ In old age, he retained her spirit, ‘Only against the sordidness & cruelty of small ambitions I fight until the long rest comes - out of that rest I believe the Great Mother will refashion beauty & life again.’ It is understood that Yeats’s letters to her were not destroyed by Free State soldiers during a raid on her house.

Brenda Maddox, Yeats’s Ghosts: The Secret Life of W. B. Yeats (NY: HarperCollins 1999): ‘While house-hunting, Maud went out to Dundrum to visit the sisters. They had long disliked her strident theatricality. Lily was now incredulous at the spectacle of Maud’s calling herself Madame MacBride and sporting widow’s weeds and veil for the late husband everybody in Dublin knew she did not lament. Maud, however, needed the martyr’s name for political purposes and for her son’s sake Sean MacBride had come over from London to joinr her and was enrolled in Mount St. Benedict School in Co. Wexford, while her “adopted” neice, as the illegitimate Iseult would continue to be known in Ireland, remained in London.’ (Maddox, op. cit., p.110).

Brenda Maddox (Yeats’s Ghosts [...] 1999) - cont.: Maddox further relates that Maud Gonne was expelled from Cumann na nGaedhael for lack of an Irish pedigree on information from John MacBride during the separation; she supplied genealogy dating her family’s arrival in Ireland to 1560, to no avail; charges against MacBride incl. suggestion that he molested Iseult were veiled in terms of drunkenness: ‘cette ivresse devait conduire MacBride aux pires immoralités’, but more explicitly recounted in English press. (Ibid., 46; and note echo of same in Yeats’s correspondence on the matter.)

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George Steiner, ‘A Terrible Beauty’, review of Gonne-Yeats Letters, in New Yorker Books (8 Feb. 1993): His review takes the form of a study of the personality, chiefly of Maud Gonne, and to a lesser extent of Yeats, formed in a climate of occultism and nationalism; ‘For a woman of the eighteen-nineties and the turn of the century to achieve personality - to make her motions of spirit and of gesture emblematic - was rare feat; .. If anything, Maud Gonne’s plunge into the occult was even deeper [than Yeats’s]. (There are in Willie Yeats occasional flashes of Irish and sardonic dubiety).’ Steiner quotes wartime letters: ‘This war {WWI] is an inconceivable madness which has taken hold of Europe - it is not like any other war that has ever been. It has no great idea behind it. Even the leaders hardly know why they have entered it, & certainly the people do not [...] If it goes on, it is race suicide for all the countries engaged in it who have conscription, only the weaklings will be left to carry on the race; & their whole intellectual & industrial life is already at a standstill. The victor will be nearly as enfeebled as the vanquished.’ (26 Aug. 1914.) He also cites a letter of 1 Oct. 1915 in which she records that she had a vision of the death of Millevoye’s son two days after having had tea with his father and the boy, only to hear of his death three days after (i.e., at the time of writing): ‘The horror of this war has made me strangely sensitive & clairvoyant. I feel the great battles & the thousands of souls going to before I read of it in the papers.’; of Irish soldiers: ‘I have been seeing, I think I have been among, masses of spirits of those who have been killed in this war, they are being marshalled & drawn together by waves of rhythmic music, it draws them into dances of strange patterns/The thousands of Irish soldiers who have been killed are being drawn together in this wild reel tune I have been hearing. They are dancing to it, some with almost frenzied intensity & enthusiasm while others seem to be drawn in unwillingly not knowing why, but he rhythm is so strong & compelling they have to dance.’ (7 Nov. 1915.)

George Steiner (review of Gonne-Yeats Letters, in New Yorker Books, 8 Feb. 1993) - cont., with comments: ‘The vivacity, the pressure of the prose is obvious, but what matters is the political and moral intelligence. ... Observe the uncanny fusion between her resort to the occult - that strange sensitivity and clairvoyance - and a political insight of utter lucidity. .. The woman who could pronounce Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist “deadly dull” and drearily lacking more than one vividly drawn character, a woman who was addicted to futile anarchic gestures and who made a piteous both of her private life, manifests in these and other letters a clarity of historical-political perception that was very nearly matchless at the time; ... Both Gonne and Yeats were actors to the core, dramatis personae in garb and gesture - masters of scenic eloquence … Historians of the theatre and of Irish cultural nationalism will find this material invaluable. What strikes the general reader is its desperate, comical Irishness. Bitter quarrels mark every step in the founding and maintenance of the Abbey and its repertoire ...’; Steiner takes away the meaning that Yeats’s letters were destroyed by Free State soldier making a bonfire of almost all her papers in her Stephen’s Green house in 1922-23; Steiner underscores the fact that Gonne and Yeats make no reference to Freud or his ideas (now undergoing an eclipse), and that ‘it is the ancient myths of bird flight and star sheen, rather than the new tales of the id and the libido, that fuel the singer and, in a being such as Maud Gonne, trigger that dance of the self we call personality.’

James Fairhall, James Joyce and the Question of History (Cambridge: CUP 1993): ‘Inghinidhe na hEireann, inaugurated in Oct. 1900 under the presidency of Maud Gonne, took action by producing leaflets that warned girls against “consorting with the enemies of their country”.’ Margaret Ward (Unmanageable Revolutionaries: Women and Irish Nationalism, London: Pluto 1983) continues, ‘imaginative propagandists, [they] revealed little awareness of the reasons why women were forced to resort to prostitution. However, a decade later, Maud … appealed through the pages of The Irish Worker for men and women to come together “without any false modesty” in order to see what could be done to prevent the system where “women were forced to sell their body, mind and soul.” She admitted that Inghinidhe … had simply “appealed to girls as sisters to keep out of temptation’s way … [with] no alternative to offer – they couldn’t get non-existent, or atrociously paid factory jobs for the women. (Ward, p.54; Fairhall, p.153.)

John Frayne, compares the Irishness of Yeats and Maud Gonne, in his estimate of Yeats’s strategies as an Irish writer in London: ‘The Irishness that Yeats exposed in English journals was not the maenad nationalism of Maud Gonne but rather the wisdom of the fairy and folk which his English readers need not have feared would burn down any landlord’s mansions.’ (Frayne, ed., Uncollected Prose of W B Yeats, Vol. I, 1970, p.26.

K. P. S. Jochum, ‘Maud Gonne on Synge’ , in Éire-Ireland, 6, 4 (Winter 1971), pp.65-70: Jochum writes: ‘Something should be said about Maud Gonne’s estimation of Synge (as far as we know it) after she met him for the first time and before she wrote this note. Synge does not figure prominently in her autobiography, A Servant of the Queen; in fact, he is mentioned only once. She says that she persuaded “le Comte d’ Arbois de Joubanville” [sic] to take Synge as his assistant. Synge’s biographers doubt whether this was really the case; they note instead that in 1897 Maud Gonne and Synge were both members of the Irish League, founded in Paris, and that on April 6th of that year Synge resigned from the League because he wanted “to work in [his] own was for the cause of Ireland.” […] Nevertheless, no ill feelings seem to have existed between Maud Gonne and Synge at this time.’ (p.67.) Jochum supplies an English translation of an article on Synge by Gonne in Les entretiens idéalistes, Jan. 1914, as infra.])

Aidan Higgins, Balcony of Europe (London: Calder & Boyars 1972), ‘Maud Gonne at Howth Station waiting for a train. The sea-wall by the harbour, the tide coming over the sandbar on Claremont beach. The English actress Lilly Elsie standing on Windsor platform waiting for a train. To see the deeps, the aspirations and the vanity of civilisations lost in the wandering depths of an ageing and vain actress’s eyes, an ageing beauty waiting at Windsor for a slow local train. / … how through the single loved body all that is most appealing in that other person is represented, continually feted, yet continually being withdrawn. Love, that most despairing grip; the cruel fabled bird that pinches like a crab. / She was all that for me.’ (Quoted by Roger Garfitt in ‘Constants of Irish Fiction’, in Douglas Dunn, ed., Two Decades of Irish Writing, 1975; q.p.).

[Katie Donovan], review of Anna McBride [sic] White & A. N. Jeffares, eds., The Gonne-Yeats Letters 1893-1938: Always Your Friend, in The Irish Times[q.d.], quotes Yeats: ‘She vexed my father with her praise of war’, and remarks: later it was revealed to him that such women come to dislike their own beauty because it is created from the antithetical self and will not allow them to develop their own souls in peace.’ Maud came with an introduction from John O’Leary; with Millevoye, Boulangists, what are now called proto-fascists; Maud Gonne devised plan to plant bombs in bunker of British troop ship; married John MacBride; divorced him for adultery and indecent behaviour; started Women Prisoners Defence league; nursed war wounded. [Cont.]

[Katie Donovan], review of The Gonne-Yeats Letters, in The Irish Times [q.d.] - cont.: ‘For the honour of our country’, she wrote, ‘the world must recognise you as one of the Great Poets of the century.’ In 1923, the day before she was taken to Mountjoy Gaol, Maud Gonne told Yeats (as he reported to Olivia Shakespear) that ‘if I did not renounce the Government she renounced my society for ever. I am afraid my help with the blankets instead of her release (where I can do nothing), will not make here less resentful.’ He wrote to her in 1927, ‘In 1910 or 1911, when you were working on the feeding of school children I met you in Paris & you told me that you were convinced that all the misfortunes of your life had come upon you because you had taken up movements which had hate for their motive power.’ [Cont.]

[Katie Donovan], review of The Gonne-Yeats Letters, in The Irish Times [q.d.] - cont.: Yeats noted in a diary, quoted here by Jeffares, that her dread of the sexual relation probably affected her whole life, ‘checking natural and instinctive selection and leaving fantastic duties free to take its place.’ In July 1900, she wrote, ‘I have chosen a life which to some might be heard, but which to me is the only one possible. I am not unhappy only supremely indifferent to all that is not my work or my friends. One cannot go through what I went through & have any personal life left, what is quite natural & right for me is not natural or right for one who still has a natural life to live.’ She objected to Yeats’s writing in 1916 that ‘too much sacrifice makes a stone of the heart’, ‘Though it reflects your present state of mind perhaps, it isn’t quite sincere enough for you who have studied philosophy & know something of history.’

Margaret Kelleher, The Feminisation of the Famine: expression of the inexpressible? (Cork UP 1997), quotes Maud Gonne’s lecture on the Famine in Luxembourg, 1892 (‘Whole families, when they had eaten their last crust, and understood that they had to die, looked once upon the sun and then closed up the doors of their cabins with stones, that no one might look upon their last agony’).

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Quotations
The victim’s voice: ‘I will be the voice of these helpless victims of England’s policy, I will speak for them before the world, even if it be but to call down the execration of mankind upon England’s civilization and England’s government, which is responsible for all this ruin and misery.’ (“Famine in the West”, in Irish Daily Independent, 10 March 1898ç quoted in Joep Leerssen, Remembrance and Imagination [...] in Nineteenth Century Ireland, Cork UP 1996, p.281-82 [n.97].

Dawn (1904): ‘They have bright swords with them that clash the battle welcome [-] A welcome to the red Sun, that rises with our luck.’ (quoted in Donald Torchiana, Backgrounds for Joyce’s Dubliners, 1986, p.90n).

W. B. Yeats (1): ‘We were both held by the mysterious power of the land. To me, Ireland was the all-protecting mother, who had to be released … to protect her children; to Willie … Ireland was the beauty of unattainable perfection and he had to strive to express that beauty so that all should worship.’ (Cited in Deirdre Toomey, ed., Yeats Annual No. 9: ‘Yeats and Women’, London: Macmillan 1992, p.4.) Further, ‘The land of Ireland, we [i.e., she and WBY] both felt, was powerfully alive and invisibly peopled, and whenever we grew despondent over the weakness of the national movement, we went to it for comfort. If only we could make contact with the hidden forces of the land it would give us strength for the freeing of Ireland. Most of our talk centred round this and it led us both into strange places.’ (‘W. B. Yeats’, Gwynn, ed., Scattering Branches [1940], pp.22-3; cited in Richard Ellmann, Yeats: The Man and the Masks, 1948, p.125.) ‘Politics separated us for quite a long while, we got on each others nerves over them and never wanted to see the other ... but he seemed to me so ill, I felt unhappy for I didn’t think we would meet again in this life’; further, ‘how lucky Willie Yeats was to escape into the freer life of the spirit beyond the limitations of time and space.’ (Letter to Ethel Mannin, 1945; MacBride & Jeffares, eds., Gonne-Yeats Letters, pp.453, 455.) ‘You have higher work to do - with me it is different, I was born to be in the midst of a crowd.’ (Ibid., p.73.)

W. B. Yeats (2) [her reaction to the poem “Easter 1916”]: ‘Standing by the sea shore in Normandy in September 1916 he read me that poem, he had worked on it all the night before, and he implored me to forget the stone and its inner fire for the flashing, changing joy of life, but when he found my mind dull with the stone of the fixed idea of getting back to Ireland, kind and helpful as ever he helped me to overcome physical and passport difficulties and we travelled as far as London together.’ (“An Account of Yeats”, in Stephen Gwynn, ed., Scattering Branches: Tributes to the Memory of W. B. Yeats, Macmillan 1940; quoted in Paul Murray, UU MA Diss., 2004; note that R. F. Foster faults her recollection on the grounds that they did not make that journey until a year later; see Foster, The Arch-Poet, 2003, p.62; original held in [Harry Ransom Humanities Research Centre, Austin.) She wrote to Yeats: ‘No, I don’t like your poem, it isn’t worthy of you and above all it isn’t worthy of the subject - though it reflects your present state of mind .... There are beautiful lines in your poem, but it is not a great whole, a living thing which our race would treasure, which would avenge our material failure by its spiritual beauty.’ She particularly objected to the fact that the 1916 leaders were represented in it as possessing ‘sterile fixed minds’ whereas she saw ‘each serving Ireland [with] varied faculties & vivid energy’, and complained that Yeats’ theory of ‘constant change & becoming in the flux of things’ would not be understood by many. (Anne McBride & A. N. Jeffares, eds., The Gonne-Yeats Letters, Hutchinson 1992, pp.384-85.)

W. B. Yeats (3): ‘Politics separated us for quite a long while, we got on each others nerves over them and never wanted to see the other ... but he seemed to me so ill, I felt unhappy for I didn’t think we would meet again in this life’; ‘how lucky Willie Yeats was to escape into the freer life of the spirit beyond the limitations of time and space.’ (Letter to Ethel Mannin in 1945; rep. in MacBride & Jeffares, eds., Gonne-Yeats Letters, pp.453; 455.)

W. B. Yeats (4): On self and W. B. Yeats: ‘We were both held by the mysterious power of the land. To me, Ireland was th all-protecting mother, who had to be released … to protect her children; to Willie … Ireland was the beauty of unattainable perfection and he had to strive to express that beauty so that all should worsip.’ (Quoted in Deirdre Toomey, ed., Yeats Annual No. 9: ‘Yeats and Women’, London: Macmillan 1992, p.4.).

On The Playboy [of J. M. Synge] - in Ireland (1907): ‘A play which pleases the men and women of Ireland who have sold their country for case and wealth, who fraternise with their country’s oppressors or have taken service with them, a play that will please the host of English functionaries and the English garrison, is a play that can never claim to be a national literature.... The centre of the national life is still among the poor and the workers, they alone have been true to Ireland, they alone are worthy and they alone are capable of fostering a national literature and a national dream.’ (United Irishman, 24 Oct. 1904; contra Yeats’s response to Arthur Griffith’s charge that The Playboy was ‘un-Irish’; cited Peter Costello, The Heart Grown Brutal, Gill & Macmillan, 1977, p.32.)

On The Playboy [of J. M. Synge] - in France: ‘A propos de J. M. Synge’, in Les entretiens idéalistes. Vol. 15 (Jan. 1914), pp.31-33: ‘The Irish literary movement has finally caught the interest of the French public; Henry Davray, Augustin Harmon, Maurice Bourgeois, and Jean Mayle published studies on Ireland and translated works of Irish writers. Several years ago, W. B. Yeats had already acquired some recognition in France. Bernard Shaw, as an English writer, had found the admiration of the French literary world. One also knew, to a certain extent, the novelist George Moore. There have been attempts to introduce the dramatist John Millington Synge. / I have attended the first performance of Maurice Bourgeois’s translation of Synge’s play. The Playboy of the Western World, given by L’Oeuvre at the Théâtre Antoine. Mr. Bourgeois has translated a practically untranslatable play with astonishing fidelity, and that is indeed a remarkable tour de force. / Nevertheless, I regret very much that the first Irish play performed in France has been The Playboy of the Western World. This play is, after all, greatly inferior in quality to others of the same author, whose dramatic work, moreover, seems to me quite inferior to that of W. B. Yeats. The Playboy of the Western World probably has certain qualities of savage power, but it cannot, in any sense, be regarded as representative [65] of the life of Irish peasants; it is only a vulgar caricature in which one of our national vices is ridiculed, the solidarity of race which induces all Irishmen to give asylum to every fugitive from the army or the English police. [...] There is certainly something more to the play than this scandalous theme; there is a soul’s awakening towards love, [...] But the very concept of the play is a flagrant injustice, the failure to understand the national character of our peasants’ (p.66; quoted in J. P. K. Jochum, as supra.)

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Famine in Ireland (Lecture in Paris 1892): ‘it has seemed to me at evening on those mountains of Ireland, so full of savage majesty when the wind sighed over the pits of the famine where the thousands of dead enrich the harvests of the future, it has seemed to me that I head an avenging voice calling down on our oppressors the execration of men and the justice of God’; acc. [Margaret] Kelleher, Gonne also wrote reports of contemporary near-famine in Co. Mayo, ‘filled with detailed and angry portrayals of the continuing reality of famine - a reality which we can be in danger of forgetting when we wonder why writers of the time weren’t commemorating the earlier famine.’ (Irish Times report on Conference of Society for the Study of Nineteenth-Century Ireland [citing paper of Margaret Kelleher], 8 Aug. 1996, p.2; and note that Yeats published the speech). Further, ‘Whole families, when they had eaten their last crust, and understood that they had to die, looked once upon the sun and then closed up the doors of their cabins with stones, that no one might look upon their last agony’. (Luxemburg Speech, 1892; quoted in Margaret Kelleher, The Feminisation of the Famine: Expression of the Inexpressible?, Cork UP 1997, q.p.)

Irish Literary Movement: ‘I believe the Celtic literary movement is most important in fact, absolutely essential for the carrying out of our scheme for the liberation of Ireland.’ (Letter to W. B. Yeats, Anna MacBride White and A. N. Jeffares, eds., The Gonne-Yeats Letters, Hutchinnson 1992, p.75.)

Empire and religion: ‘I hated nothing in the world but the British Empire which I looked on as the outward symbol of Satan in the world & where ever it came in I was to declare hatred of heresy I declared hatred of the British Empire &c in this form I made my solemn Abjuration of Anglicanism & declaration of hatred of England.’ (Letter to W. B. Yeats concerning her ‘abjuration’ of Protestantism on converting to Catholicism in order to marry John MacBride; cited in George Steiner, ‘A Terrible Beauty’, review of Gone-Yeats Letters, in New Yorker Books, 8 Feb. 1993).

Queen Victoria: ‘Taking the shamrock in her withered hand she dares to ask Ireland for soldiers - soldiers to protect the exterminators of their race.’ (See Karen Steele, ed., Irish Nationalist Writings of Maud Gonne, IAP, 2004, 344pp.; quoted in review, Books Ireland, Nov. 2004.)

Becoming a Catholic: ‘About my changed religion I believe like you that there is one great universal truth. God that pervades everything. I believe that each religion is a different prism through which one looks at truth ... Our nation looks at God through one prism, The Catholic Religion. I am officially a Protestant supposed to look at it from another, a much narrower one which is moreover an English one. I prefer to look at truth through the same prism as my country people - I am going to become a Catholic. It seems to be of small importance if one calls the great spirit forces the Sidhe, the Gods [?or] the Archangels for the great symbols of all religions are the same - But I do feel it important not to belong to the Church of England.’ (Letter to W. B. Yeats, 10 Feb. 1903, in answer to his accusing her of stepping down to a ‘lower order’ by marrying John M[a]cBride and by converting; Gonne-Yeats Letters 1893-1938, pp.164).

Marriage to John MacBride: Letter to Yeats writing of her ‘abjuration’ of Protestantism on conversion in order to marry MacBride:] ‘I hated nothing in the world but the British Empire which I looked on as the outward symbol of Satan in the world & where ever it came in I was to declare hatred of heresy I declared hatred of the British Empire &c in this form I made my solemn Abjuration of Anglicanism & declaration of hatred of England.’ (Cited in George Steiner, ‘A Terrible Beauty’, review of Gone-Yeats Letters (New Yorker Books, 8 Feb. 1993).

On Violence [having explaining why in 1897 she joined the Catholic Church]: ‘I believe every political movement on earth has is counterpart in the spirit world and the battles we fight here have perhaps been already fought out on another plane and great leaders draw their often unexplained power from this’. She though that Parnell had ‘failed because he repudiated acts of violence’ and plotted with the Belgians to blow up British troop ships in the Boer War. (Quoted in Louis MacNeice, The Poetry of W. B. Yeats, 1944.) Cf. A. N Jeffares, New Commentary on the Poems of W. B. Yeats, London; Macmillan 1984: ‘[MG] offered a Boer agent in Brussels a plan to put bombs in British troopships bound for Africa’, citing Hone, W. B. Yeats, p.169, and Jeffares, Yeats, Man and Poet, p.133).

Living landscape: ‘The land of Ireland, we both felt, was powerfully alive and invisibly peopled, and whenever we grew despondent over the weakness of the national movement, we went to it for comfort. If only we could make contact with the hidden forces of the land it would give us strength for the freeing of Ireland. Most of our talk centred round this and it led us both into strange places.’ (‘W. B. Yeats’, Gwynn, ed., Scattering Branches [1940], pp.22-3; quoted in Richard Ellmann, Yeats: The Man and the Masks, 1948, p.125.)

On The Playboy (of Synge): ‘A play which pleases the men and women of Ireland who have sold their country for [e]ase and wealth, who fraternise with their country’s oppressors or have taken service with them, a play that will please the host of English functionaries and the English garrison, is a play that can never claim to be a national literature.... The centre of the national life is still among the poor and the workers, they alone have been true to Ireland, they alone are worthy and they alone are capable of fostering a national literature and a national dream.’ (Maud Gonne, United Irishman, 24 Oct. 1904; contra Yeats and his response to Griffith’s charge that The Playboy was ‘un-Irish’; quoted in Peter Costello, The Heart Grown Brutal, Gill & Macmillan, 1977, p.32).

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