W. B. Yeats & George Yeats: The Letters

Abstract

After his marriage to Bertha Georgie Hyde Lees in a register office in Paddington on 20 October 1917, W. B. Yeats fell into ‘great gloom’. He accused himself of having ‘betrayed three people’, his ex-lover Maud Gonne, Gonne's daughter Iseult who had rejected his proposal of marriage earlier that year, and his new wife. Then, on honeymoon, his new wife surprised him. It was, he wrote, ‘something like a miraculous intervention’: ‘[George] got a piece of paper and talking to me all the while so that her thoughts would not affect what she wrote, wrote these words (which she did not understand) “with the bird” (Iseult) “all is well at heart. Your action was right for both …”’.1 The uplift in Yeats's mood which followed this ‘discovery’ that George possessed the talent for automatic writing is an early tribute to the power of her discretion – as well as to her cleverness at quelling her husband's preoccupation with Iseult – but it also marks the beginning of a new collaboration which led to Yeats claiming early in 1918 that ‘a very profound, very exciting mystical philosophy’ was coming ‘in strange ways to George and [himself]’.2 This collaboration between husband and wife culminated in the system elaborated in A Vision, which was first published in 1925.