Becoming George: The Life of Mrs. WB Yeats

Patricia Morley is professor emerita of English and Canadian Studies at
Concordia University and an avid outdoor recreationist. She is the
author of several books, including The Mountain Is Moving: Japanese
Women’s Lives, Kurlek and Margaret Laurence: T

The Irish poet William Butler Yeats has long since been immortalized,
but his wife has remained in the shadows until now. Ann Saddlemyer, a
scholar of the Irish literary revival, draws on new and unpublished
sources to present an intriguing account of a strong and talented woman
whose scholarship and occult interests fueled the poet’s imagination
over the last 20 years of his life.

The close collaboration of husband and wife, especially in the
restoration and renovation of their home, Thoor Ballylee, has not been
widely known before this long and loving tribute to Georgie Hyde Lees.
The two married in 1917, when Georgie was 25 and Yeats, 52. Georgie’s
automatic writing and extrasensory perception fed the poet’s imagery,
while her emotional warmth supported both his body and spirit.

Saddlemyer points to Georgie’s instinct for self-effacement and her
choice to appear to the world simply as Yeats’s wife, helpmeet, and
secretary, and the mother of his children. For 30 years after his death
she nurtured his literary legacy while also supporting generations of
younger writers. “Mrs. W.B. Yeats” is long overdue for recognition
as an epistolary writer and as a powerful and influential personality.

Saddlemyer is a professor emeritus of English at the University of
Toronto, and the editor of

the prize-winning Collected Letters of John Millington Synge, Volumes 1
(1983) and 2 (1984). She is a patient and thorough scholar with a
passion for the area she has marked as her own. Readers with similar
interests will find much to reward their exploration into this
monumental study.