Yeats and Women: Brenda Maddox, Richard Ellmann, A. Norman Jeffares, R.F. Foster

Abstract

An artist and his life and work seem to me to belong to a public domain, and his life also needs a thoughtful treatment. In this respect Brenda Maddox, Yeats’s Ghosts: A Secret Life of W.B. Yeats (New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 1999) poses a little problem although it seems to me to have contributed a lot to Yeats scholarship. It is in part a thing that entertains and fulfills the curiosity of the general readers who are looking for something secret in an artist life. In recent decades people’s attitude to the sex life of a person has changed, and nothing is not suppressed today. However, the author Maddox discussing the personal life of both should have paid some attention to what she has been writing about and the possible damage her writing could give them; though it is rarely done, the picture of George Yeats sounds ridiculous and that of Yeats is more so. On the other hand, I could also see the merits of this book: if you want to read this book slowly, you will learn a lot, as the book’s Index shows. For instance, all the controls that have shown up while the Yeatses have been doing automatic writing are indexed with care. And all the women Yeats has had an affair with are also indexed meticulously (as this is a biography), and in the Index you will see a lot of works, poems and plays, which are put in the context of Yeats’s course of life.