Newly Identified Chapters for The Speckled Bird, 1897–8 Version: “The Lilies of the Lord”

Abstract

Yeats wrote four distinct versions of his unfinished novel The Speckled Bird. Those were published in 1977 in an annotated edition, The Speckled Bird with Variant Versions (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart) (abbreviated SB), which I edited, together with a textual reference volume, Literatim Transcription of the Manuscripts of William Butler Yeats“s The Speckled Bird (Delmar, NY: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1976) (abbreviated SBTran). Each of the four versions lacks at least one page, and, as might be expected, the earlier versions are less complete than the later versions. The first (or “Island”) version (1897), for which only thirty-five manuscript pages are extant, begins with a page numbered “23” and has another gap of two pages. In my 1977 edition, the second (or “Leroy”) version (1897–8), had sixty-seven extant pages but was missing nineteen pages. It began in its fifth chapter, with a page numbered “17”, and had two later gaps, one of a single page and another of two pages. By contrast, the third (or “DcBurgh”) version (1900) lacks only three pages, in single-page gaps, among its 285 extant manuscript pages, and the fourth (or “Final“) version (1902–3) is missing only one page among 334 extant pages of manuscript and typescript.